defrag takes much longer on 1000GB drive

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...

Go on Roddie, send him one of your scathing templates and make him feel
*really* small. Come on, DANCE! NOW!!!

Ron Speed wrote:

Larc wrote:

You have only one partition on the drive? That's like having one
huge drawer in your house that you keep everything you own in.

Nope, nothing like.

Yep. Something like.

We have a funky computer thingo that keeps track of
where everything is in the case of the drive that isnt available with the drawer.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to organise by folder tree than partition with a drive.

Wrong, in many people's situations and opinions, and that's all that
counts, for them.

Some pathetic little gutless ****wit desperately cowering behind
Bilky White wrote just what you'd expect from a desperately
cowering gutless ****wit.

chrisv wrote
Ron Speed wrote
Larc wrote:

You have only one partition on the drive? That's like having one
huge drawer in your house that you keep everything you own in.

Nope, nothing like.

Yep. Something like.

Nope, nothing like.

We have a funky computer thingo that keeps track of where everything
is in the case of the drive that isnt available with the drawer.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to organise by folder tree than partition with a drive.

Wrong, in many people's situations

Wrong, not one.

and opinions, and that's all that counts, for them.

The opinion of fools who cant grasp the basics is completely irrelevant.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage chrisv wrote:
Ron Speed wrote:

Larc wrote:

You have only one partition on the drive? That's like having one
huge drawer in your house that you keep everything you own in.

Nope, nothing like.

Yep. Something like.

Good analogy. Actually disk defragging has aspects of a packing problem,
i.e. how to pack the files best with the least moves. These problems
have no fast solutions and approximations will also either grow in
effort much more strongly than linear.

We have a funky computer thingo that keeps track of
where everything is in the case of the drive that isnt available with the drawer.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to organise by folder tree than partition with a drive.

Wrong, in many people's situations and opinions, and that's all that
counts, for them.

It does make sense to organize by both. UNder Unix/Linux doing it
that way is standard, as you can have symbolic links that seamlessly
(well mostly) hook one tree into another across partitions. MS has
overlooked this invention for a few decades and stuck to the
histroic and very, very outdated concept of "drive letters".
(Stupid? Incompetent?) The easiest way under Windows is indeed
separate partitions.

Arno

On 31 Jul 2009 18:35:21 GMT, Arno wrote:

MS has
overlooked this invention for a few decades and stuck to the
histroic and very, very outdated concept of "drive letters".

Arno, you appear to be outdated. NT-derived versions of Windows have had
the ability to mount drives and folder trees into other folder trees since
Windows 2000 - maybe earlier. Try searching on "mount drive as folder ntfs"
in Google.

Arno wrote:
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage chrisv
wrote:
Ron Speed wrote:

Larc wrote:

You have only one partition on the drive? That's like having one
huge drawer in your house that you keep everything you own in.

Nope, nothing like.

Yep. Something like.

Good analogy.

Lousy one, actually. You dont have folders/directorys in a drawer.

Actually disk defragging has aspects of a packing problem,
i.e. how to pack the files best with the least moves. These
problems have no fast solutions and approximations will
also either grow in effort much more strongly than linear.

Not relevant to the OP's problem with only 30GB on a 1TB drive.

We have a funky computer thingo that keeps track of
where everything is in the case of the drive that isnt available
with the drawer.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to organise by folder tree than
partition with a drive.

Wrong, in many people's situations and opinions, and that's all that
counts, for them.

It does make sense to organize by both.

Nope, no point in farting around with mulitiple partitions with Win.

Too hard to get the sizes right initially, because the size needed
changes over time and too dangerous to resize partitions without
a full backup which that level of user hardly ever has.

UNder Unix/Linux doing it that way is standard, as you can have symbolic links that seamlessly
(well mostly) hook one tree into another across partitions. MS has
overlooked this invention for a few decades and stuck to the
histroic and very, very outdated concept of "drive letters".

Hasnt been like that with Win for a hell of a long time now, since 2K.

(Stupid? Incompetent?) The easiest way under Windows is indeed separate partitions.

Wrong. By far the easiest is folder trees in a single partition.

That way the free space isnt scattered across the
partitions and the no folder can ever run out of space.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Frazer Jolly Goodfellow wrote:
On 31 Jul 2009 18:35:21 GMT, Arno wrote:

MS has
overlooked this invention for a few decades and stuck to the
histroic and very, very outdated concept of "drive letters".

Arno, you appear to be outdated. NT-derived versions of Windows have
had the ability to mount drives and folder trees into other folder
trees since Windows 2000 - maybe earlier. Try searching on "mount
drive as folder ntfs" in Google.

I am not outdated and I know this can be done. It was possible with
special drivers even before. But why is nobody doing it? And why does
MS still have the drive letters?

Arno

On 06:53 31 Jul 2009, Arno wrote:

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage sandot
wrote:
Defragging my 1000 GB hard drive takes much longer than a 200 GB or
500 GB. drive. My system may be a bit slow but the difference in
time is very large (maybe 10 times longer). The cluster size on
all my hard drives is 4KB.

Is it because the NTFS indexes and other system software are so big
that they need a significant amount of processor and I/O time?

As the 1000 Gb fills up will it start to get sluggish? I don't
want two 500 GB drives but I'll do that if it prevents a problem.

This is the CHKDSK data:

976751968 KB total disk space.
36065140 KB in 19106 files.
5144 KB in 725 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
154888 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
940526796 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
244187992 total allocation units on disk.
235131699 allocation units available on disk.

Defragging is not a linear operation in the number of allocation
units on the drive. It gets more than proportionally slower. In
addition, it is possible that you hit some limit and the
implementation (data A replaces B and then gets replaced by B again
and so on), which can give you nearly arbitrary slowdown.

You do not need two 500GB drives. You can use two 500GB partitions
instead. The limit here is the filesystem size, not the drive
size.

Arno


I'm the OP. If the overhead exists for a defrag then a similar overhead
may appear on a 1TB during normal processing when drive gets fuller. I'll
partition the 1TB drive into two 500GB partitions to cut down on the
extra workload caused by such large system structures.

Does what you say mean there's a sweet spot for size of an NTFS
partition? I get the *intuition* anything bigger than 250GB could start
to get sluggish.

(Assuming 2-platter 7200rpm SATA with file sizes typical of a home office
system.)

On 1 Aug 2009 15:21:46 GMT, Arno wrote:

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Frazer Jolly Goodfellow wrote:
On 31 Jul 2009 18:35:21 GMT, Arno wrote:

MS has
overlooked this invention for a few decades and stuck to the
histroic and very, very outdated concept of "drive letters".

Arno, you appear to be outdated. NT-derived versions of Windows have
had the ability to mount drives and folder trees into other folder
trees since Windows 2000 - maybe earlier. Try searching on "mount
drive as folder ntfs" in Google.

I am not outdated and I know this can be done. It was possible with
special drivers even before. But why is nobody doing it? And why does
MS still have the drive letters?

Arno

So what you're now saying is that with Microsoft you *can* do it the
Unix/Linux way as well, contradicting what you said earlier. Thanks for
clarifying that.