On Sep 2, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:

> Which is why the people doing such projects here usually rely on large
> scratch drives they can reformat between projects.

At a large general-purpose service bureau with whom I was formerly  
employed as a lead (i.e., principal) systems programmer, we  
"squished" (the System/370 version of a defrag) our customer- 
accessible drives on a periodic basis, usually several drives per  
evening shift.

Now, this was way, way back when a large drive was 200 MB (3330-11),  
and a very, very large drive was 316 MB (3350).

Fast-forward nearly two decades and drives were hardly larger, in  
real-world terms: 1 GB (3390-1), 2 GB (3390-2) and 3 GB (3390-3), and  
the performance of the 9 GB 3390-9 was just plain too slow for any  
use except long-term archiving as it spun at 1200 rpm instead of the  
usual 3600 rpm in order to accommodate three times the data, while  
maintaining the same aeriel density, yet increasing the mximum  
latency from 16.67 msec to 50 msec.

For true "scratch" volumes, which were usually 3330-11s, these were  
"scratched" (i.e., initialized, thereby deleting all data) every  
evening.



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