13 Sep
2004
13 Sep
'04
2:01 a.m.
On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 19:49, Cournapeau David (ENST) wrote:
Mark Knecht wrote:
Yep - that, and also that as a drive becomes more full it also naturally
becomes more fragmented, and fragmentation causes more drive head
movement seeking out places to put data.
It all ends up working against you and it a good reason to clean up
disks now and again, assuming that your file system doesn't do it for
you automatically. (I'm unclear about this aspect of Linux file systems.
Possibly some do this automatically, either in real time or
periodically. Much to learn...)
While none of this directly applicable to what
you are experiencing,
when I read your note it seemed similar enough to go ahead and write
back. It might not only be the type of files system, but also where on
the drive you are writing. It's not always that well known, but most
drives are 30-50% slower at the far end of the drive. Most drives are
speed rated when they are empty.
Without knowing anything about the details of
hard drive conception, I would think that ALL
drives are much slower for tracks near the
axe than on the border of the disks, since
the speed is proportional to the distance track->axe.
This is inherent to any system using a disk and having
constant angular speed.
I know that even windows
95 tried to put the data on the borders of the disks of
an hard drive as long as it could. I am pretty sure linux does the same.
cheers,
David