Paul van den Bergen via luv-main wrote:
none of my suggestions, though humorous, are helpful...
disk partition level thinking doesn't consider file system level
thinking is probably the correct answer, which incidentally also
explains why some hypervisor snapshots suck chunks...
On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 12:16, Nic Baxter via luv-main
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi All
I am moving a 1TB NTFS partition 200MB to the right using gparted
and of
course it is very slow. I don't understand why gparted is moving
all of
the data. Why not just move 200MB and add it to the end of the
partition? My googling only tells me how to do it but not why.
In trying to unwrap Paul's explanation above ;
a naive suggestion is as follows (complaints welcomed):
1/ part of the function of "file systems" is to hide the connection of
data eg files,
to the underlying hardware ie platter; track, sector.. number, etc;
from the OS and the user; but in part that connection is still visible;
in the possibility that NTFS like FAT32, is still capable of becoming
fragmented, yes?
-therefore files fragments can become scattered all over the partition
space;
-therefore just extending the partition "200MB to the right" (sector
numbers are increasing ?);
then removing 200 MB of file fragments from the "left" and moving it
to this new vacant partition space ;
is going to do severe damage to the file system !
2/More generally "partition management software" ; for partition:
creation, extension, cloning and
recently the ability to create virtual partitions as files in such
underlying partitions;
is intimately involved with hiding this connection of files and file
fragments to the hardware
ie platter number, sector number, etc; which is why such software is
not simple;
even though its operation at the OS level is conceptually (logically ?)
simple.
3/Digressing;a further take-away point is that occasionally it is worth
looking back at the mountain of abstraction we have built;
and often hide from ourselves in this notion of data:
bits, bytes,hexadecimal number, decimal floating point number, measure
of physical quantity in relevant units,....etc
regards Rohan McLeod
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