[TP-OT Was: ]Re: [Thinkpad] Re: Windows & H/D Defragging

From: David Ross <ross_at_math.hawaii.edu>
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 15:14:12 EDT

> web pages. Given the amount of web pages one can visit in just a day
> I can understand why there might be reports of "excessive" disk
> fragmentation.

Even if this area is totally jumbled, it should not represent a large
fraction of the drive space (if one has set the cache size reasonably, say
under 30 megs), and so should not trigger this report.

> With a nearly full volume, you might have to perform several successive
> runs of the disk defragmentation software in order to get all the files
> defragmented, just because the disk defragmentation software had to have
> enough free space available on the disk to temporarily store all the
> clusters it was moving around.

Technically, you only need one free cluster, though a 'towers of hanoi'
style defrag scheme is both slow and dangerous (since a mid-swap crash could
kill a file). I had occasion to write one of these years ago, for CP/M.

- David R.

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Received on Thu May 1 15:17:29 2003

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