On 04/12/2001 at 18:44 Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T. wrote: <delenda est> >> > Everyone was using a utility called something like Drive Space or >> > Double Space that would let you hold 40megs of info on a 20 meg >> > hard drive. Using this utility though at the time, the hard drives >> > tended to fail in a short period of time and need replacing. >> >> Completely unrelated. First, Doublespace was a compression program. >> Saying a 20 meg drive could hold 40 megs was like saying a 40 meg file >> will zip to 20 megs. If you stored nothing but .exe files which don't >> tend to compress well on it, you would see a loss of space on the drive. >> >> Doublespace could not cause a drive to mechanically fail, any more than >> any other program that reads and writes to the disk can cause it to >> fail. > >Unless it was another utility, I read and was told that what it did was >rewrite the directory in such a way that it caused to drive write to >more of the sectors on the drive. Making the drive work harder to try to >write in-between sectors. If that's wrong. then the information givenat >the time was wrong at the time.
DoubleSpace and similar OS extensions could expose weak drives/controllers, they also tended to suffer from fixed buffer overflow problems so that the drive could become corrupted. Running a compressed drive close to its theoretical maximum size could also cause problems. Simon
