(Excerpts from a message dated 12-11-99, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard to
Murray Lesser)

Hi Jonathan--

 ML> Available-space discussions make sense only when one remembers
 ML> that they are purely relative.  You really ought to understand that 8
 ML> MB is only 0.1% of an 8 GB drive (0.2% of a 4 GB drive, in case
 ML> arithmetic is difficult for you), so is in the noise as far as usable 
 ML> space on such drives is concerned.   One tenth of one percent isn't 
 ML> worth worrying about, let alone making a serious(?) suggestion that 
 ML> legacy drive usage be modified to "save" any part of it.

JP>The suggestion that the cylinder alignment restriction in FDISK be
  >limited was motivated by many years of seeing many people complain
  >in this and other fora that "Boot Manager consumes a whole 8MeB! 
  >Utility X only consumes a couple of sectors.  Boot Manager is
  >rubbish!".  Obviously, people *are* concerned by such things --
  >quite a few people going by the number of times that I have seen
  >this sentiment expressed.  Indeed, having myself worked for many
  >years with a machine whose hard disc was continually around the 98%
  >full mark, I can assure you that people *do* think that one tenth of
  >one percent matters.

    The only HPFS partition that I run that is more than 90% full is the
one that contains only compilers.  Thus, it essentially is used as
read-only except during a compiler update, so there is no loss of
performance due to its being so full.  After updating a compiler, I
"defrag" the partition by backing it up, reformatting, and restoring it,
before using it for production.

     But even if you insist on taking the performance beating associated
with a 98%-full HPFS partition used for read/write, 0.1% "unusable"
space is only 5% (1/20th) of the space you are not using anyway, so has
no real effect on your operation.

    I am not surprised that there are a great many people without an
engineering or science background who "think that one tenth of one
percent matters" as far as disk-space usage is concerned.  But I am very
surprised that you indicate that you are one of them :-(.

    Regards,

        --Murray

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 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * Nothing is so uncommon as common sense

--- Maximus/2 2.02