Creating huge data in very less time.

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-03-31, Dave Angel <davea at ieee.org> wrote:

>>> Unfortunately, although the program still ran under NT (which
>>> includes Win 2000, XP, ...), the security system insists on
>>> zeroing all the intervening sectors, which takes much time,
>>> obviously.

>> Why would it even _allocate_ intevening sectors?  That's pretty
>> brain-dead.

> The FAT file system does not support sparse files.
>
> They were added in NTFS, in the Windows 2000 timeframe, to my
> recollection.

NTFS was added in NT 3.1 (which predates Win2K by 7-8 years).
However, I don't remember anybody using it much until a year or
two later around NT 3.5

Which makes one wonder if perhaps the change in behavior under
NT/2K/XP wasn't the security system zeroing out intervening
sectors but rather the filesystem not allocating them at all
and returning 0's when one read a "hole" in the resulting
sparse file.

> Don't try to install NTFS on a floppy.

Not to worry, the thought hadn't occurred to me.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I've read SEVEN
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