Vaclav Haisman wrote: > On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, Gary R Van Sickle wrote: > >> "Note: It is up to the application to maintain sparseness by writing >> zeros with FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA", sez the Platform docs. > > In this respect Windows are ahead of any recent Unix system. I wasn't > able find any Unix/Posix syscall that would allow this unlike Windows. > >> Even if you do WriteFile()s with all zeros on a sparse file, you are >> actually hitting the disk. > > Have you ever tryed the same thing in Unix environment? Writing > buffer full of zeros with write syscall won't gain you anything > either. All the zeros will be physicaly written onto the disk. This > means it has the same behaviour as Unix systems. > >> The only thing this patch will do AFAICS is set a bit somewhere in >> the guts of NTFS that will be pretty much ignored. I'm with Max, I >> don't see the benefit and can only imagine the consequences. > > I don't see any negative consequences of this patch. The only one I > can imagine it can slow down file operations but I very very doubt it.
Could you do some tests, so we have more than conjecture to go on? What programs actually *benefit* from sparseness? Max.