Dave Hooper wrote:
If you were planning to use Windows 2000 or XP exclusively, I might suggest
using a compressed directory as your freenet datastore - not because of the
disk space this saves (it would save very little, probably - see end of
message), but because the compressed clusters are shared within the
directory tree so only the last cluster allocated to the directory tree has
'wasted' space at the end. Ideal if you care about space but don't care so
much about extra processing time. Although obviously an NTFSv5 feature only
(and so not applicable to the original fat32 posting)
this was my orginal plan, and i was posting to find out if anyone knew
how to enable a compressed directory in win2k :) but now i think i'll
probably go with a separate 2 gig fat32 partition... that is if i can
figure out how to tweak a fat32 to have smaller blocks.
"OS-level" compressing of directory trees in pre-NTFSv5 operating systems
(i.e. before Windows 2000) can be achieved by using commercial software like
www.zipmagic.com/zipmagic, which (among other things) makes zip files appear
to the operating system as regular 'explorable' folders, or by using the
built-in DriveSpace / DoubleSpace utilities to set up a virtual compressed
drive. Actually I would make a personal recommendation for zipmagic, it
really is rather good, and I'm sure there must be a less expensive
alternative available
On my NTFS partition, my store currently has about 3% wasted space from
cluster allocation. Setting the NTFS Compress flag shrinks it so that my
store uses only .5% more space 'on disk' . (Yes - the compressed datastore
still uses more than the 'on paper' amount of disk space, mainly due to the
encrypted nature of the datastore and its inherent incompressibility coupled
with the still necessary cluster allocation)
I would therefore expect similar results under FAT32 - that is, a .zip
datastore with zipmagic or similar using only about .5% more space than the
datastore size on paper. However that is on likely to be true if you can
keep the .zip file fragments together... I don't know what zipmagic's
fragmentation guarantees are, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were no
guarantees whatsoever.
It is possible to preallocate files under NTFS using tools such as Contig
(www.sysinternals.com) to ensure that they do not fragment - however this
only really works in practice for files which do not grow and shrink
unpredictably, such as files which are written to rarely but read often.
I'm guessing such a tool would be of only limited value for a freenet
datastore. I have no idea if comparable utilities are available for use
with FAT partitions.
dave
thanks for the quality info, dave
-joschi
___________________________________________________
Josh .. Yoshi .. Joschi .. http://mp3.com/vitriolix
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