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Topic: Sector sizes ??? |
Harry Hess
From:
Blue Bell, PA., USA * R.I.P.
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Posted 2 Oct 2000 6:26 pm |
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I have a beige G3 in which I have added an internal Seagate 18 gig hd, and to which I have also added another external Seagate 18 gig hd. When I purchased the Seagate drives, I sent them to Rorke Data. I had them mount the external in one of their external drive enclosures, and format both of them in a manner they said was "optimized" for Audio & Video.
Recording the 3 rhythm track CD's that I recently published has left my drives crammed up with 13.1 gigs of audio files, as well as a few gigs of previous files that also needed to be saved.
I just bought a QPS 1050 DVD-ram drive. It uses the 5.2gig DVD-ram disks (2.6gigs per side). After formating the the disks, they will actually hold 2.3 gigs per side... 4.6 total per disk.
After spending a week figuring out how to get it all operating correctly, and another week copying the contents of the internal Seagate 18 gig to 5 disks, I am ready to wipe and (possibly) reformat the drive. However, the same files copied onto the disks occupy FAR LESS space. The file sizes are considerably smaller. Either good news or bad.
In any event, I can't wipe these files till I'm sure that I have successfully & safely backed them up.
Par for the course re: hardware/software techs, the QPS techs and the DVD-Ram Tune Up (operating software) techs can offer no answer for the smaller file sizes. (I know I may be living in a dream world, but there ought to be a law that prevents these companies from marketing an item untill they have a support team in place who can actually explain the characteristics of said item.)
In this case, the software tech passed me off to Rorke Data. He said that since the Seagate drives are almost 2 years old, the Rorke techs must have formatted the Seagate drives with larger "Sectors" (?). He said in layman's terms, if a drive is set to record data in 20 byte sectors, even a 2 byte file will occupy 20 bytes. Hence, the newer QPS DVD-ram drive is probably recording in more modern/smaller sectors, resulting in smaller files but still including all of the original data.
I get to chase down the Rorke techs tommorrow... hopefully I'll reach them and hopefully I'll get an answer.
Do any of ya'll have experience in this area?
Am I being given the hi-tech bam-boozel/run around?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Harry Hess[This message was edited by Harry Hess on 02 October 2000 at 07:36 PM.] |
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George Rozak
From:
Braidwood, Illinois USA
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Posted 3 Oct 2000 6:13 pm
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Harry... I'm not sure how DVD media breaks down sectors, but on hard disk drives you want to be concerned with cluster size, not sector size. Clusters on a hard disk are made up of multiple sectors, and each sector can store 512 bytes of data. However, a cluster is the smallest unit on a hard disk in which you can store a file. So a hard disk with cluster sizes of 32,000 bytes will use the entire 32,000 bytes to store a file that is only a few bytes in size.
Generally the larger the hard disk, the larger the cluster size. I'm assuming that you're using the FAT32 file system already since your hard drives are so large. FAT32 is much more efficient that the old FAT16 file system. One way to reduce the cluster size is to partition your hard disk into 2 or more logical drives with a partitioning utility such as FDISK or Partition Magic. Make sure you back up any data on the hard disk before trying this though.
Hope this helps.
George
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Everett Cox
From:
Marengo, OH, USA (deceased)
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Posted 4 Oct 2000 1:17 pm
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Harry-- I use Windows/DOS PC's and don't have any experience on MAC's. However, if you do/can run Windows or MS-DOS on your machine, I may be able to find or write a program to provide you with the needed info.
Under Windows, RIGHT-clicking a file, group of files, or a folder will present a menu which contains a 'properties' option. LEFT-clicking that will give you, along with other data, the ACTUAL size of the file(s) as well as the 'used' disk space.
I have a small(57K) program that provides just what you're asking for. It is a Windows program, though, and I have not found a similar utility for the MAC. -- Everett |
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Harry Hess
From:
Blue Bell, PA., USA * R.I.P.
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Posted 7 Oct 2000 4:33 pm
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Thanks for the help, guys. I was able to determine that the info that I had was correct. I've successfully backed up the files and have moved on.
I know my way around the mac OS pretty well. I wouldn't want to try getting into Windows or Dos or any of that. But thanks for your help.
Regards,
HH
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