Vaclav Haisman wrote: >> 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,
That's nice. Did you read the bit above where I quoted MSDN? Merely setting the file as sparse will NOT SAVE SPACE on Windows. So, no space gain, and a performance penalty of untested magnitude. I see only disadvantages. Max.