Reorg and > 4GB HD partition

[Hyperspeed]

I would stay well clear of ReOrg... even when patched to v3.11.

The damn thing used to corrupt my disks, crash etc.

It's not worth risking all your data to speed it up a tiny fraction.

It would interest me if, in real world usage, defragmentation actually speeds up reading and writing. Putting all the data in one chunk at the start of a disk as opposed to it being spread over the drive might even create wear on one particular area of a disk over time.

What do others think?

[Hyperspeed]

by Zac67:
The drive doesn't actually mind re-reading and writing the same old spot over and over again.

Well a drive's life isn't measured in years or how much it's head has wobbled about... it's in write cycles right?

I once created a bad block on a Win 3.11 system when I yanked the plug out just as it was reading a file. Possibly it was also writing to a swap file or something but it goes to show that the disk surface can be affected adversely by the head.

Bad blocks are usually mapped out at the manufacturer but they do appear, who knows why. Maybe it's to do with the magnetic coating losing it's gauss or whatever they measure it in.

The one thing that I have seen a drive or two dying from though is dead bearings. I have a sneaking suspicion that mounting a drive sideways or upwards may cause bearing wear... but I have only seen it on Windows machines. Maybe the constant writing to virtual memory and endless bloated files on bootup just make the drive commit suicide!

:-D

By all means use ReOrg to see how fragmented a drive is but I would advise using a UPS (uninteruptable power supply), a good IDE/SCSI cable and remove all hacks/tasks before use.

DiskSalv will not help you if ReOrg has a tantrum... you will lose everything.

[Hyperspeed]

by pVC:
It might be faster to defrag by copying all files to other HD, format original and copy all files back. As a by-product you get full backup too

I tried that once but ReOrg reported the destination drive was just a clone of the fragmented source. The fragmentation had copied too. This may be FFS though.

Piru: Do you know anything on magnetic hysteresis, I'm curious as to how this works.

Also, modern drive reporting tools are not available for Amiga and HDToolBox can't even perform a CheckDisk as efficiently as the PC.

AmigaOS 4.0's new HDToolBox looks neat, especially with it's SCSI specific verification features. Wonder if there's a dedicated defragger...

[Hyperspeed]

Thanks amije that's interesting. Magnetic Hysteresis must then mean a delay or loss in magnetism.

From what I've read it's a way of recovering data off a hard disk's surface even after it has been full-formatted multiple times.

Apparently spy agencies use this method but it may be increasingly difficult now with higher densities of data on the drive.

How the process works is a complete mystery to me though...

[Hyperspeed]

A common misconception is that overwritten data ... can be recovered by different means, especially by intelligence agencies.

A common misconception is that Wikipedia is always right and that intelligience agenices never hide what they know - nor do they put false information into the public domain to reinforce the police state which they strive to attain.

:-D