FAT32 or NTFS?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul Smith
  • Start date Start date
Bob said:
If I start an off-topic thread, I try to remember to put OT at the
beginning of the subject. However, it is not possible to change the
header once a thread has diverged. One possibility is to start a new
thread with the old subject but with OT prepended.

It has been my observation over the years that bitching on Usenet
about this alleged wasting of precious bandwidth (whatever that means)
wastes more bandwidth than if the whiner had just said nothing.
Click to expand...

Yes, it always seems to lure some nasty trolls out of their hiding.
But then Usenet is a public forum, so I do not complain about whiners.
Click to expand...

Liar:
" We'll chat about any thing we want to chat about. If you don't
like it then call 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Now you bugger off, troll"
Let them whine all they want for all I care. It's good for a laugh.
Click to expand...

An old geeser that must be in his sixties, still behaving like a streetpunk.
 
Your newsreader is configured to show it as a separate thread, but
anyone that is scoring based upon References and anyone that has their
newsreader to not treat a change of Subject as a new thread, won't see a
difference caused by the change in Subject.
Click to expand...

I prefer it to start a new thread because the pupose of changing the
subject was to create a distinction between the old contents and the
new contents.

I also prefer the use of

OT: <old subject>

But then who am I to be preferring anything on Usenet.


--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
Liar:
Click to expand...

I am not a liar.
" We'll chat about any thing we want to chat about. If you don't
like it then call 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Now you bugger off, troll"
Click to expand...

That is not whining.
An old geeser that must be in his sixties, still behaving like a streetpunk.
Click to expand...

And you would be a young twit?


--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
That's worst-case. And if the files are 2M, you'd have to use 100 HDs
to need the extra one, which really is a shrug.



And if the MFT is caught halfway through this process?

Perhaps I don't see the bad mileage if FATxx that you do, because I
don't use one big C: for everything. All of my FATxx-based systems
have C: with 4k clusters, limited to just under 8G, and that's where
most of the write traffic is going on. The bulk of the capacity in E:
is FAT32 with big clusters, but there's not much traffic there.

I'm certainly not recommending 120G HDs be set up as one big FAT32
volume; even though that still has maintainability advantages over
NTFS, the reliability gap may be as wide as you claim.

There is one factor that could lead to software crashes, and that is
uncertainty about free space. An app may query the system for free
space, be told there's enough, and then dump on the HD without
checking for success. Normally it would be concurrant traffic and
disk compression that would cause this "oops", but FAT32 (not FAT16)
does add an extra factor; the free space value that is buffered in the
volume's boot record, which so often gets bent after a bad exit.

Then again, AFAIK startup always checks and recalculates this value;
it's one of the extra overheads of FAT32 at boot time.


Well I should hope so, as that's the mileage I'd expect in FATxx as
well. It shouldn't blink even if free space fell to 5M. C: might
look like it blew up with 25M to go, but that's prolly because a few
seconds ago it may have been down to 0k free due to a temp or swap
splurge... then again, I've seen 0k-free C: and I haven't seen data
carnage. The data carnage I see is usually where RAM has been flaky
for some time, or there's been a malware strike, or the HD is failing,
or the PC was overclocked, etc.

FATxx doesn't just fall over for no good reason, from what I've seen,
though persistant issues from bad exits might compound into
cross-links later. Not sure if that does happen, but possible, though
I'd expect to see a lot more cross-links if that were the case.



Depends what has gone wrong. Corrupt data can be better than none,
especially where text is concerned; OTOH, half a .DLL is no bread :-)
Click to expand...
It's important to know what is corrupted and what is not - and that is
what I have against "auto-fixing" junk. It's the equivalent of
throwing the needles back into the haystack.
Click to expand...


It's statements like this that lead me to believe there is no
experience with business data, here. You can't tell the auditor that
"you can only recover part of the database". It's everying, or I'm
fired. I don't know how I'd figure out what the correct parts of a
multiMB TIFF file are. I have visions of printing each cluster out on
my color printer, indivually, cutting them out, spreading them on the
floor, and treat them like a jigsaw puzzle. Recovery of all important
data is based on backups, which are certain, dtat recovery is not
guaranteed to get your work back under all types of equipment failure.

Jeesh. a decade of experience with thousands of NTFS-based systems at
one of the biggest banks in the world must count for something. Every
time I looked at an old machine that was still FAT32 I found all these
mystery .CHK files. These don't happen, all practical pruposes with
NTFS. If one of my tech staff raised his hand and said "I can might
be able to recover those files for you sir, but it will take me a day,
and it may not get the data back", I'd tell him he had more important
things to do.

I also don't understand what data you say NTFS is deleting as part of
a tranaction rollback. The blocks were in an undefined state, so I
down't _want to_ recover them.
What happened to the incomplete transaction? That's the data I want
back. I don't want some clueless fixer deciding for me that it's
corrupted and therefore should be discarded without a trace.

It's very easy to look bulletproof if you simply destroy everything
that may be damaged. You could do that in FATxx as well - in fact,
the duhfault behaviour is close - simply by maintaining a list of
files open for writes, which are automatically deleted on bootup.

But that is not data preservation.



Throwing away any transaction that is not complete is not data
preservation. Basically, you get the worst-case auto-fixing Scandisk
result, i.e. as if you'd let Scandisk automatically fix all errors and
throw away all lost cluster chains.

All of this nonsense about transaction rollback "doing away with the
need" for disk maintenance utilities hinges on the only problem being
the interruption of sane file operations.
Click to expand...
What about damage from other causes, such as wild disk writes, bad RAM
corrupting content and address of writes, program crashes, and
deliberate malware raw disk writes as per Witty?
Click to expand...

Backup proceedures, tailored to fit a business risk assesment cover.
everything.
 
* Bob Wrote in news.software.readers:
I prefer it to start a new thread because the pupose of changing
the subject was to create a distinction between the old contents
and the new contents.
Click to expand...

Starting a new thread OR not has no bearing on the distinction. If the
Subject is changed its a non issue to find posts relating to the topic
as an added bonus you can see how or why the thread broke off which in
some cases maybe helpful to others. Starting a new thread destroys the
audit trail making it near impossible to reconstruct the whole
conversation.
I also prefer the use of

OT: <old subject>

But then who am I to be preferring anything on Usenet.
Click to expand...

Convention SHOULD take place over preference on Usenet or in any medium
that is considered a collabrative effort. Imagine a bunch of
programmers working on one project and not having a style guide to work
off. Anyone coming in at a later date would have a nightmare attempting
to maintain the code.

Usenet has established standards for similar reasons.
 
Usenet has established standards for similar reasons.
Click to expand...

And the most widely accepted convention is to put "OT:" in front of
the subject to create a new thread or the appearance of a new thread.

--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
Bob said:
And the most widely accepted convention is to put "OT:" in front of
the subject to create a new thread or the appearance of a new thread.
Click to expand...
Bullshit. That is not the purpose of OT:

Simply change the subject if the subject is changed. Post a new article if you
want to start a new thread.
 
["Followup-To:" header set to news.software.readers.]
* Bob wrote in news.software.readers:
And the most widely accepted convention is to put "OT:" in front of
the subject to create a new thread or the appearance of a new thread.
Click to expand...

Um, no. OT is prefaced to indicate the topic of the thread is OFF topic
based on the group hierarchy. The convention of which you speak is
using: New Subject (was: Old Subject) and NOT breaking the references.
 
Bob said:
If I start an off-topic thread, I try to remember to put OT at the
beginning of the subject. However, it is not possible to change the
header once a thread has diverged.
Click to expand...

Free Agent doesn't allow that? And I always heard it was supposed to be
good. Glad I never bothered with it.
One possibility is to start a new
thread with the old subject but with OT prepended.

It has been my observation over the years that bitching on Usenet
about this alleged wasting of precious bandwidth (whatever that means)
wastes more bandwidth than if the whiner had just said nothing.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately this is true.
 
Bob said:
This is a new thread, not the original one with the header changed.
Click to expand...

Threading is handled by the reader, not the host. If it's showing up as a
new thread in Agent then either you have something misconfigured or Agent
is not all it's cracked up to be.
 
This is a new thread, not the original one with the header changed.

I believe the convention would be

OT - FAT32 or NTFS?

as the new subject.
Click to expand...

We're still in the same thread. Using MicroPlanet
Gravity 2.60b (a good free newsreader, but a bit long in
the tooth). I suspect you need to find a better
newsreader.
 
Jeesh. a decade of experience with thousands of NTFS-based systems at
one of the biggest banks in the world must count for something. Every
time I looked at an old machine that was still FAT32 I found all these
mystery .CHK files. These don't happen, all practical pruposes with
NTFS. If one of my tech staff raised his hand and said "I can might
be able to recover those files for you sir, but it will take me a day,
and it may not get the data back", I'd tell him he had more important
things to do.
Click to expand...

Hey Al, maybe you should ask your "staff" how to fix your attribution line.


[snip]
 
Threading is handled by the reader, not the host. If it's showing up as a
new thread in Agent then either you have something misconfigured or Agent
is not all it's cracked up to be.
Click to expand...

I am satisfied with this behavior. I prefer it that way.


--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
I suspect you need to find a better newsreader.
Click to expand...

I prefer this behavior. To me these are two different threads. If they
weren't then the subject would be the same as the original for all
posts.

--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
Free Agent doesn't allow that? And I always heard it was supposed to be
good. Glad I never bothered with it.
Click to expand...

I have an old version - deliberately so. I like the separation of
threads according to topic content. It is possible a newer version has
this as an option.

If someone changes the subject, that tells me they are starting a new
thread. Otherwise why change the subject?

--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

"You can all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."
--David Crockett
 
I prefer this behavior. To me these are two different threads. If they
weren't then the subject would be the same as the original for all
posts.
Click to expand...

Google Groups goes to the opposite extreme. If it finds two otherwise
unrelated posts with identical subjects, it puts them in a thread.
 
And the most widely accepted convention is to put "OT:" in
front of the subject to create a new thread or the appearance
of a new thread.
Click to expand...


I have never seen that. I have seen lots of other uses for OT.
 
Transactions are journalled not per file, but per file system.

File expansion transaction is complete before the data can be written there.
It means, extent record is updated, free cluster bitmap is updated, and the
transaction is marked as complete in the journal. It's not connected with
the file close event.
 
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