On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 at 10:14, Joshua Rice via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Of course, doing it that way has many disadvantages, not least the > fragmentation issue (which was the root cause of much periodic slowdown > on Windows machines in the mid 00's), but also the overheads involved > with transferring rather scattered and unorganised RAM contents into > nice, neat blocks understood by the filesystem. Though i have no numbers > to back up my claims, i'm sure the overheads involved in translating RAM > contents to a file was much more significant than just dumping the RAM > contents into a SWAP partition. Yeah... there were folk beliefs about how positioning on the disk made a big difference, too. When PartitionMagic came out, it caused me some fun. When I joined _PC Pro_ magazine (at Issue 8) we had a copy of v1 in the cupboard. Its native OS was OS/2 and nobody cared, I'm afraid. I read what it claimed and didn't believe it so I didn't try it. Then v2 arrived. It ran on DOS. Repartitioning a hard disk when it was full of data? Preposterous! Impossible! So I tried it. It worked. I wrote a rave review. It prompted a reader letter. "I think I've spotted your April Fool's piece. A DOS program that looks exactly like a Windows 95 app? Which can repartition a hard disk full of data? Written by someone whose name is an anagram of 'APRIL VENOM'? Do I win anything?" He won a phonecall from me, but he did teach me an anagram of my name I never knew. It led me to run a tip in the mag... At the time, a 1.2 GB hard disk was the most common size (and a Quantum Fireball the fastest model for the money). Format that as a single FAT16 partition and you got super-inefficient 16 kB clusters. (And in 1995 or early 1996, FAT16 was all you got.) With PartitionMagic, you could take 200 MB off the end, make it into a 2nd partition, and *still fit more onto the C: drive* because of far more efficient 8 kB clusters. If you didn't have PQMagic you could partition the disk that way before installing. The only key thing was that C: was less than 1 GB. 0.99 GB was fine. I suggested making a D: drive and putting the swap file on it -- you saved space and reduced fragmentation. One of our favourite small PC builders, Panrix, questioned this. They reckoned that having the swap file on the outer, longer tracks of the drive made it slower, due to slower access times and slower transfer speeds. They were adamant. So I got them to bring in a new, virgin PC with Windows 95A, I benchmarked it with a single big, inefficient C: partition, then I repartitioned it, put the swapfile on the new D: drive, and benchmarked it again. It was the same to 2 decimal places, and the C drive had about 250MB more free space. Panrix apologised and I gained another geek cred point. :-) -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
