Even rsync worked fairly speedily atop mounted volumes, and that’s pretty much a worst case as far as file system access is concerned.īut my use cases for remote file access revolve around three main scenarios: In UseĪlthough it’s impossible to do sane benchmarking when accessing filesystems over the Internet, I’ve been merrily editing files across the Atlantic and to almost-local servers without any issues – just like I did with version 2 – and have noticed no constraints whatsoever. The old layout used a modal pop-up that overlap the drive listing, though, and the multi-pane window makes it a trifle easier to manage more volumes (which is pretty relevant for me, given that I have over a dozen remote mounts set up on it), so the changes are welcome. That is immaterial in daily use (you only need to go there to add new drives, and I personally only use the menu bar icon to mount drives and the Finder to unmount them), but despite the cleaner look I sort of miss the old design. There have also been some cosmetic changes – the drive manager window is now a bigger, roomier affair, but, alas, it doesn’t feel as native as the older version. Well, the big ticket items for me are improved performance (always a nice thing to have, especially since its smart caching has made slow connections eminently bearable in the past), WebDAV support and access to Dropbox – as in being able to mount Dropbox as a local drive, which is something that I find very handy indeed these days. If there’s one thing you can’t ever be without, it’s storage options – and access to them.ĮxpanDrive 3 was recently revamped, and given that I’ve been using it for years now for FTP and SFTP/ SSH access to remote hosts I it was a no-brainer to give the upgrade a spin – you can do that yourself for free for a week, and upgrade from version 2 for $19.95 till the end of May.įull Disclosure: It bears noting that despite being a paying user since version 1.x, I got my upgrade license for free.

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