
- #BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE MOVIE#
- #BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
- #BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE FREE#
- #BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE WINDOWS#
The fact is, most Americans don't have access to the broadband performance they'd need to actually eliminate external drives or other local storage. The local drive map is handy, set up is simple, and the price is great - provided you've got the upload bandwidth to make the service sing. Bitcasa: Potentially a great ideaīitcasa does some really smart things. Next page: Bitcasa conclusion: Potentially a great idea. For semi-rural New York State, that's as good as it gets.
#BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE DOWNLOAD#
Download performance topped out at 1.5MB/s or ~12Mbps. Video stopped playing at all and audio skipped badly, even after giving the file several minutes to load.ĭownload speeds, like upload speeds, are excellent. An episode of American Horror Story played back perfectly if I started from the beginning, but Bitcasa couldn't synchronize audio/video playback if I skipped ahead more than a minute or two. Music and small videos streamed flawlessly, but the service choked on larger videos. I tested media playback on various files but saw mixed results. I suspect this is a problem with NB itself, but this app needs a watchdog to play nice with others. I tried using a third-party tool to limit upload bandwidth, but NetBalancer wasn't able to control Bitcasa's speeds. Using Bitcasa to upload a file effectively shut off my 'net for any other task. The bad news is that routers respond remarkably poorly to upload saturation, and mine is no exception. The good news is that upload speeds are excellent - my system was able to sustain a 100KB/s connection to Bitcasa, fully saturating my own upload bandwidth. This application sucks bandwidth like a fat kid on cake and it doesn't like to share.

That brings us to another problem - Bitcasa is an extraordinarily bad bandwidth citizen. At 100KB/sec, it'll take me nearly two days to upload these files. In reality, however, the file copy has barely begun.
#BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE MOVIE#
If I click on the movie from the I:\ location, it starts to play. There's a file on my I:\, the file copy dialog has closed. The real problem here is that as far as the end-user can tell, the file copy is actually complete. There's no way to append the upload list or cancel the second job as far as I can see. That 17GB figure implies that my first upload (with the default cache) is still scheduled, with the second uploaded thereafter.

The System Tray icon, however, tells a different story: If I pull up Bitcasa's I:\, I can see my file - apparently uploaded. According to Windows, my computer has almost finished copying an 8GB file into the online repository. When I cranked the cache up to 12GB and retested, I saw the following: Adjusting the size of the data cache has a marked impact on the apparent copy speed. Explorer is famous for terrible copy time predictions, but that's not what's happening here, at least not entirely. Notice the difference between the actual copy speed (reported by NetBalancer) and the copy time in Microsoft Explorer. The copy procedure starts by caching data locally - with the cache file set to default, I lost ~500MB of storage space on C:\ when the copy began.
#BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE WINDOWS#
Once you choose a file to copy, you'll see the normal Windows file copy dialog appear, with a ludicrously optimistic estimate of how long it'll take to upload your data. Hopefully that'll be addressed in future revisions. There doesn't seem to be a way to define where this cache is kept - I'd have preferred to use my other hard drive and leave the SSD for other tasks. Explorer support is also integrated you can right-click and choose to drop a file over. Grab documents or data, drop them on the "Infinite Drive" logo, and poof, they're uploaded.

There's also a mapped location on the left-hand side, where Drive, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Initially, this didn't work, but after a reboot, a Bitcasa drive appeared. Next page: Explorer integration, performance benchmarking, and streaming video playback Explorer integrationĪfter all the talk of Bitcasa as an infinite drive, I thought it might actually show up as a Network location from My Computer.

#BITCASA PERSONAL DRIVE FREE#
You can mix and match between the two to free up local storage without needing to change the entire program's configuration. If you do enable mirroring, Bitcasa offers you file-level control over whether or not documents are mirrored to the site or just copied over. Choose whether you want to mirror or not, but I'd recommend going with "Not," at least for the moment due to the impact on total upload bandwidth. Near as I can tell, Bitcasa means that the files you choose to mirror are always available in their original locations. Mirrored folders are always backed up and available offline? That would be sorcery.
