2 Questions

[Magnum]

I was downloading a large windows security update and wondered why the % downloaded did not change much after a while.

I turned off the setting for shutting down the hard drive after 20 minutes, and then the download speed went up.

So I started wondering.

I found this, but then others said that Windows should have never offered this setting.

What's the truth ?

Since data was being written to the disk, it should  never shut down during a download.

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Turn off hard disk actually would not take effect until after the scans had stopped reading the hard disk for the given timeout period. Remember, the condition for turning off the hard disks is "after xxx minutes of no disk activity" It would hardly be desirable to turn off a disk while a program was busily writing to it.

Also, by the way, even if the disks do reach their turn-off time, any subsequent access by an already running program (including Windows itself) cancels their off-time and they wake up.



My secondary disk has 2 partitions.

1st partition contains only my pagefile and zip files.

2nd partition has only disk images. This partition is 57 Gb with never more than 12 Gb used.

Is defragmenting the 2nd partition just wearing it down a little faster since I only use it when restoring a disk image
which at most is maybe once a month ?

[FORTRANS]

Hi,

   In the past, there were two reasons to defragment a disk
drive.  One, performance would improve as allocating and
accessing files would be more continuous.  Two, file recovery
was much easier if the file is contiguous.

   With "modern" disk caches the performance hit is probably
no longer a consideration.  If you waste more time defragmenting
than you gain in improved usage, don't bother.  The improved
file recovery?  I have a suspicion that modern file systems
have more to say about that than anything else.

Regards,

Steve N.

[MichaelW]

Modern hard disks use zone bit recording to pack more sectors, and therefore more data, into the outer tracks. Since the disks rotate at a constant speed (CAV), the higher data density in the outer tracks equates to higher data transfer rates (by a factor of something like 2.5 IIRC) between the media and the drive's buffer/cache. I think most disk defragmentation tools consider this in their selection of where to put the files in a partition, and I think it would be a good idea to consider this when deciding where to put the partitions.