> Is it wise to set *all* new files to sparse? Surely if this was actually > advantageous, Windows would do it anyway? From MSDN: "Note It is up to the > application to maintain sparseness by writing zeros with > FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA." I.e., this will gain nothing unless the application > knows about sparse-ness, in which case, it should explicitly specify that > the file should be sparse. So, all this patch will do is to force Windows to > examine more metadata for every file read. This seems *extremely > undesirable*. > > Max.
As I have written in my previous emails in FreeBSD and SunOS all files are sparse if underlying file system supports it. I doubt Windows is significantly slower/faster in inspecting file system metadata than either of these OSes, Vaclav Haisman