RapidCRC Unicode is a file hashing tool for Windows. As the software title suggests, it supports unicode characters for file system. With its help, we can create file hashes using many algorithms such as MD5, CRC32, Blake3, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, ED2K etc.
RapidCRC Unicode comes in form of an installer and also as a portable program. The advantage of installing it on your Windows system is that you will be able to right-click on any file and check or calculate the hashes for that file. It is also possible to setup the shell extension for RapidCRC Unicode in the portable version, but it is much easier to just use the installer version.
Creates hash files for verification
Unlike many other file hashing programs, RapidCRC does not generate and show you the hashes in its window. Rather it creates hash files containing the calculated file hashes. For example, if you have a file notepad.exe, then RapidCRC will create a file notepad.exe.md5 containing the MD5 hash for notepad.exe. Later, we can just double-click on the hash files (in the previous example, notepad.exe.md5) to verify the hashes. The hash files have the same extension as the algorithm that was used to generate the hashes.
Save CRC hashes in alternate data streams
Apart from creating hash files, we can also save the file hashes in the alternate data streams (ADS) which is available only on NTFS file system. We can view the saved hashes using programs like Phrozen ADS Revealer very easily. However if we copy any of these files on a non-NTFS partition, the ADS are removed automatically and along with the ADS any saved file hashes will also disappear.
Save CRC hashes in filenames
Similar to saving the file hashes inside ADS, we can also save the CRC hashes in the filename itself. This feature is available only for CRC hashing algorithm perhaps because CRC hashes are very small (only 8 characters long). We can simply select “CRC into Filename” from the context-menu and it appends the CRC hash for the selected files in their filenames.
Conclusion
RapidCRC Unicode is indeed a very fast file hashing software for Windows. It supports a large number of hash algorithms and covers all the popular ones like CRC, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512 and MD5. It integrates well with the File Explorer and is a great way to verify the integrity of the downloaded files.
You can download RapidCRC Unicode from https://www.ov2.eu/programs/rapidcrc-unicode.