rbt wrote: > Chris Lambacher wrote: > >>The reason they are slow and tedious is that they need to write to >>every byte on the disk. Depending on the size of the disk, there may >>be a lot of data that needs to be written, and if they are older >>computers, write speed may not be particularly fast. > > OK, I accept that, but if you have a HDD that's 8GB total and it has 1GB > of files, why must every byte be written to? Why not just overwrite the > used portion?
Because sometime in the past, you may have had 8 GB of data on there. There's no reliable way to know which bytes have been used and which haven't. This is a case where "doing it properly" means "slow." -- Robert Kern [EMAIL PROTECTED] "In the fields of hell where the grass grows high Are the graves of dreams allowed to die." -- Richard Harter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
