Question for Tumbleweed.

[Alon Brodski]

Hey!

Experimenting with cluster size won't hurt anything (except for my time).I
can always go back to 4 K.
The question remains the same...the command exist,the "a" switch also
does....for what? just for the sake of being a purely theoretical option?

When I have the money I would upgrade my PC.I can add another 192 MB of RAM
to the total fo 384 MB.

What I want to ask you is what exactly you meant when you said about an
extra physical HD in the system?
Were you talking about RAID-0? But it's not like where you keep your stuff
separetly on 2 HD's.The pricipal of RAID-0 is that it's seen to Windows as
ONE drive.And you win the performance due to the same fact I mentioned
before:
ACCESS TIME in HD's.Which is very slow.Like 1000 times slower vs. RAM and
CPU.So when you have 2 HD's
It's like picking up apples by 2 people vs. 1.Data blocks would be accessed
simultanously in 2 disks by 2 heads.
But it's NOT the same as keeping different type of data on 2 drives....For
that I don't need even RAID or XP....That can be done in Win95 too....Say I
buy another HD...then what?I use one for my data and another for everything
else?
And swap file and apps to keep together or what? May be you can give me an
idea about what you had told me in your last e-mail?

Thanks in advance!

Alon.

 

[Tumbleweed]

Hey!

Experimenting with cluster size won't hurt anything (except for my time).I
can always go back to 4 K.
The question remains the same...the command exist,the "a" switch also
does....for what? just for the sake of being a purely theoretical option?

Dunno, I have partition magic which works better than most of these obscure
comamnds since at the very least it gives you a chance to review what you do
before you **** your system up (doesnt stop you doing that, but it lowers
the chances

When I have the money I would upgrade my PC.I can add another 192 MB of RAM
to the total fo 384 MB.

Thats the first thing to do, everything else is secondary. WIthout that, you
arent going to get good performance whatever you do.

What I want to ask you is what exactly you meant when you said about an
extra physical HD in the system?
Were you talking about RAID-0? But it's not like where you keep your stuff
separetly on 2 HD's.The pricipal of RAID-0 is that it's seen to Windows as
ONE drive.And you win the performance due to the same fact I mentioned
before:

You are also ****ed if either disk fails. Bad idea unless you have more
backup.

ACCESS TIME in HD's.Which is very slow.Like 1000 times slower vs. RAM and
CPU.So when you have 2 HD's
It's like picking up apples by 2 people vs. 1.Data blocks would be accessed
simultanously in 2 disks by 2 heads.

But when you have so little memory everything goes via the disk anyway. and
when you have more memory you will still have all that access aimed at that
one disk. At work i design large computer systems, and the simple rule for
databases is 'stripe and mirror everything'. More heads is better(and more
memory is even better)!

But it's NOT the same as keeping different type of data on 2 drives....For
that I don't need even RAID or XP....That can be done in Win95 too....Say I
buy another HD...then what?I use one for my data and another for everything
else?

yes its true its certainly not restricted to XP. At the moment on your
system everything is swapping off one drive, every time you do anything you
always have to move the heads. With two disks, maybe the system wont have to
do that, for example if it reads from swap, writes data, reads from swap, on
the second swap it may not have to move the heads at all if swap is on one
disk and the data on another.

And swap file and apps to keep together or what? May be you can give me an
idea about what you had told me in your last e-mail?

I have two disks. One has C: partition on it, swap and apps and nothing
else. All data is on the other disk. This also helps for backups since I can
image my C drive (which is relatively small) onto space on my second disk.
It also helps if I ever have a serious issue and need to reinstall windoze,
since my data is unaffected. Same for a disk crash, since whichever crashes
I can get back my system (imaged on second disk) or my data (copied
automatically every night back to another partition on the same disk at the
C partition.) And finally, I can install Linux (waiting for fedora 3),
without screwing things either.

I could have got slightly better performance by RAIDing my drives (my system
actually came configured as RAID 0*) but I figured that after a crash the
performace would be nil so I'd rather have slightly (probably imperceptibly)
lower performance all the time, rather than none at all sometimes.

--
Tumbleweed

*and was a bastard to 'un-RAID'
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