"Simon P. Lucy" wrote: > > 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
Thanks for saying doing as you say "could" cause weak drives to fail sooner DoubleSpace and similar OS extensions could expose weak drives/controllers Anyway Quit using the Utilities at the time made the drives last longer even though they wouldn't hold as much (at that time in history). -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling 616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:275-632-0868 Martinsville Va 24112-1809 |[EMAIL PROTECTED], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet --------------------------------------------------------------------------- If it's "fixed", don't "break it"! mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/america/default.htm http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/message/default.htm
