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An interesting thought I had: If you want to load something particular from a hard drive,and there is a lot of other stuff on it, it may take longer to find the thing you're looking for. Imagine a storage unit full of boxes: if you were trying to find one particular thing, which is in one of the boxes, you would have to look through a bunch of other stuff first, before you find it; possibly opening many unwanted boxes along the way. As computer users in the modern age, we love the idea of a big hard drive that is full of lots of data. But could it be the case that all of this precious data is slowing us down? Because when we want to load it, there is other data in the way.
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Jun 21, 2023 02:07
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maybe if you organized the files in order of frequent use and keep related stuff in sequential order, it would make searching a little faster. no idea if anyone has tried this but worth a shot
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Jun 21, 2023 02:33
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I think some old computers could read data off the edge of the disk faster than the inside and programmers would write optimizations to put all their data right on the edge 
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Jun 21, 2023 02:44
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Huh, apparently this in fact sort of a thing with ssd's, I had assumed it was a relic of old school platter drives that had gotten badly defragged.
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Jun 21, 2023 02:50
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does it matter with modern indexing and solid state storage also isn't it always a little faster to have data on the edge of spinning rust? the edge is always going to be moving fastest
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Jun 21, 2023 02:51
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yeah its exactly like when you eat too much but cant poop
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Jun 21, 2023 02:53
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no
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Jun 21, 2023 03:58
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wait
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Jun 21, 2023 03:58
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yes
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Jun 21, 2023 03:58
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an empty harddrive is full of zeros (big and round), but a hard drive with a bunch of files will have a bunch of ones, which will take up less space, op
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Jun 21, 2023 04:21
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windows 95 introduced TRIM which is about pubes
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Jun 21, 2023 05:24
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a single gigabyte file is faster than 1000 1mb files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
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Jun 21, 2023 05:38
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this question has different answers based on what you mean by the "thing" in "finding something", various layers of the operating system, file system, and HDD controller either come into play or don't depending
Dijkstracula fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 05:47
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is a full hard drive heavier than an empty hard drive?
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Jun 21, 2023 06:02
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akadajet posted:is a full hard drive heavier than an empty hard drive? surely not is a shuffled deck of cards heavier than a unshuffled deck all other factors being the same
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Jun 21, 2023 06:20
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akadajet posted:is a full hard drive heavier than an empty hard drive? little munchkin posted:an empty harddrive is full of zeros (big and round), but a hard drive with a bunch of files will have a bunch of ones, which will take up less space, op
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Jun 21, 2023 07:12
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it makes sense. it makes sense. if i eat a huge amount of food i sure won’t be moving fast any time soon
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Jun 21, 2023 07:26
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akadajet posted:is a full hard drive heavier than an empty hard drive? yes, by about 10^-14 grams per terabyte
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Jun 21, 2023 07:39
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Tunicate posted:yes, by about 10^-14 grams per terabyte is a hard drive ever empty ??? isn’t it always 100% full of information even if it’s noise/garbage/zeros?
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Jun 21, 2023 07:59
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this is a multi-dimensional question, op. so let’s look at its individual components. for a spinning disk: a fuller drive is likely to be more fragmented. this means non-contiguous reads and writes, which slows spinning disks considerably, since seek times are brutally slow. a fuller drive also requires the heads to move further to find the data, as it may be on the inner sectors or the outer sectors of the disk. an emptier drive, properly defragged, is going to have all of the data in adjacent sectors to minimize head movement. for ssds: ssds are effectively copy on write, which can lead to lots of fragmentation in the physical block layer. when there are fewer empty pages to deal with, garbage collection often resorts to coalescing fragmented pages (I.e., copying the valid blocks to a new page so the current page can be erased). this is a lot of write amplification. fuller drives, particularly fragmented ones, will have more complex flash translation layer (FTL) mapping tables. these translate logical block addresses to physical ones. finding a block may require reading more levels of entries, and rewriting one adds more maintenance effort to the ftl data structures. while ssds are far better at scatter-gather IO than spinning disks, it is still suboptimal to linear IO, especially if blocks are interleaved on parallel nands chips (kind of a raid 1 setup) for filesystems in general: many file systems scale pretty poorly with many files or lots of files in a single directory. finding the index nodes for a file may require linear searches through long directory entries, meaning they need to be read, often with multiple layers of indirection, just to find the intended file. this is the slowdown we are used to when dealing with many small files. so, in conclusion, disks suck and are bad. would not recommend.
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Jun 21, 2023 08:17
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echinopsis posted:is a hard drive ever empty ??? isn’t it always 100% full of information even if it’s noise/garbage/zeros? a magnetic disk is never empty. flash media is “full” when it’s erased. writing frees trapped electrons so it gets lighter.
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Jun 21, 2023 08:20
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I forgot your ram, op. your OS page cache is less likely to contain the data in the full drive, because there is more of it. it is less likely to have cached copies of the directory entries your care about or the index nodes for the files you want to read. that’s going to cost you a lot more in io overhead,
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Jun 21, 2023 08:23
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The Management posted:a magnetic disk is never empty.  so flash media is a whore for electrons but we want to introduce it to christ
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Jun 21, 2023 09:06
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If you think about the original hard drive, chiseled stone, it would get lighter as you stored more data on it.
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Jun 21, 2023 09:09
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a curious device. gets lighter as you write to it, and even lighter as you erase.
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Jun 21, 2023 09:27
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The Management posted:this is a multi-dimensional question, op. so let’s look at its individual components. nerd
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Jun 21, 2023 10:46
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Buck Turgidson posted:If you think about the original hard drive, chiseled stone, it would get lighter as you stored more data on it. be careful though. with the next type of hard drive, cast bronze, it could be the opposite
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Jun 21, 2023 10:47
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fart simpson posted:nerd thanks. i couldn’t sleep last night so I typed this thing and then I could sleep. thanks yospos
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Jun 21, 2023 16:30
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when you delete too many files the drive disintegrates. its just physics
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Jun 21, 2023 16:52
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a heavy hard drive. full of bbw porn
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Jun 21, 2023 16:53
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getting swole by downloading a lot of linux isos before lifting my computer
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Jun 21, 2023 16:58
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*pats hard drive* yep I got like 60 lbs of cat pics in this bad boy
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Jun 21, 2023 16:59
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full drives work faster, if x% of the capacity is used there's a x% chance that your data is under the head already, so when you issue the request "give me my data" a 100% full drive can always just immediately start giving it to you.
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Jun 21, 2023 17:03
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remember to defrag that poo poo so all the data is sequential.
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Jun 21, 2023 17:06
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All the extra data allows the disk to spin faster, not slower.
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Jun 21, 2023 17:08
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akadajet posted:remember to defrag that poo poo so all the data is sequential. wouldn't that put all the 1s on a single side and you get an out of control washing machine scenario
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Jun 21, 2023 17:11
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Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:wouldn't that put all the 1s on a single side and you get an out of control washing machine scenario if you use full disk encryption the data has high entropy, so that doesn't happen.
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Jun 21, 2023 17:11
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so, we've arrived at Cyber Gravity. the idea that a hard drive with more data will operate slower than one with less. This belief likens data to a physical burden, a peculiar, and quite honestly, flawed concept.
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Jun 22, 2023 14:03
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akadajet posted:remember to defrag that poo poo so all the data is sequential. in the infinite vastness of the world the whispers of such theories echo through the endless grids of cyberspace, casting a shroud of doubt upon the minds of many. its a haunting song, a narrative spun from the threads of confusion and misconception, a nocturnal dance in the realm of the irrational
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Jun 22, 2023 14:06
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I miss the defrag util in windows
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Jun 22, 2023 17:23
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