20 ms·
Defrag Like It's 1993
- jaimex2 5y agoThis feels unsettling without hearing disk needles clicking.
- queuebert 5y agoI miss the incredible slickness of these old DOS programs. Single-character commands, judicious use of color, and efficient presentation. Pure art.
- xtracto 5y agoThe "magic" of doublespace / norton utilities, XTree Gold hex-view and other programs amazed my young self.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoWell when the target platform only had 512KB ram, or 640K if they could afford it, and a 30MB drive cost $400, you had to squeeze every last bit out of your program. Norton Utilities were slick. Slicker than any MSDOS tools, or even Apple Dos 3.0 or ProDOS (or ProntoDOS for that matter) utilities for that matter.
- fouc 5y agoI never understood why the beautiful & easy-to-use QBasic Editor never inspired a copycat for linux. It would've easily beaten out nano.
- sprash 5y agoMidnight Commander "mcedit" comes close to the aesthetics (blue background, grey dialogs with shadows, etc.) but is not a perfect copy. A perfect clone of the MS-DOS editor for UNIX/Linux does not exist. Maybe this is the new toy project for the "written in Rust" crowd.
- vanviegen 5y agoI think that is because back then, terminals weren't capable of handling key combinations like shift-arrows (for selection), ctrl-c (for copy), and mouse support wasn't great either.
- indeyets 5y agoJoe's Own Editor is a thing since 1988 https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y agoIsn't that more of a Wordstar copy? I loved QBasic but never hade any love for JOE.
- fouc 5y agoWell the one of the appealing part of QBasic Editor was the friendly bright blue color scheme. Along with the always present menu bar on the top. Just a great editor for newbies. Seems like Joe has the helpful menu system, but it feels overall more "serious" in comparison, especially with the minimal white on black color scheme.
- megalottachoc 5y agoHeck, watching that do its job felt good
- dane-pgp 5y agoLike watching an AI speedrun 1-dimensional Tetris.
- widea 5y agoI remember vaguely Diskeeper on OpenVMS, still wonder if it helped or not.
- teeray 5y agoWow, my browser is so much faster now
- marginalia_nu 5y agoThey should port SoftRAM to the web too, I could do with some additional memory.
- themodelplumber 5y agoNot sure if equivalents are still recommended for Windows users, but I've seen zram recommended to Linux users quite a few times. Someone also wrote a script to start killing processes before the system can hang when it runs out of RAM. https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733 https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733
- marginalia_nu 5y ago> Someone also wrote a script to start killing processes before the system can hang when it runs out of RAM. Isn't this exactly what the OOMKiller does?
- themodelplumber 5y ago> does Makes you wonder... https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-runs https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-run...
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI had a bunch of problems with the OOM Killer on a server of mine. It seems to have been due to not having any swap partition. Linux seems to assume you do, and the OOM strategy behaves really poorly when you don't. Like, it doesn't need to be large, the machine has 128 Gb RAM and the swap partition is 1 Gb.
- Minor49er 5y agoThe variable width font face throws off the effect on mobile
- ffhhj 5y agoFirefox destop site switch improves the rendering, but still..
- MBCook 5y agoIt works fine on my iPhone, perhaps it’s not setting a correct proportional font on android?
- Minor49er 5y agoI think you're right. I tried this on Firefox for Android. Looks great on Firefox for OSX, though!
- centerorbit 5y agoCreator here: Yes, that's bugging me too. I think the default "monospace" font on Android is def not monospace. I'm going to look into embedding a font instead.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoOn Chrome (Windows) the box frames at the bottom are no right-aligned either. Have you thought about using <canvas> and just writing OEM DOS style characters where they need to be like some sort of obscene franken-video-buffer?
- Waterluvian 5y agoDoes anyone ever see the W writing state? I don’t. :(
- that_guy_iain 5y agoI do.
- stkdump 5y agoI lament that it seems to start out with a 80-90% free disk and ends with a 60-70% full disk and reads mostly blocks that are free. And when it's done it just restarts with a fragmented disk...
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoI guess if the author/anyone was really bored, they could write a more realistic simulation, with an object that simulates the disk and its sectors/clusters, another that simulates the file allocation table, and even another that simulates the disk with the I/O seek/read/write times (even taking into consideration the time needed for the head to move from different places...).
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoNeeds the read/write arm noises for a fuller experience...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- keyle 5y agoshhrrrrr shrrrrr sshhrrrrr tic shrrrrr /s I remember now, you could even hear the reverberation in the metal case!
- melony 5y agoWhat is the optimal algorithm for defragmentation? Some sort of sort?
- TacticalCoder 5y agoCurious too here! I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of a dynamic programming algo similar to 0-1 knapsack.
- maxerickson 5y agoWhat is being measured? You've got contiguous space, speed, total time, wear.
- jaimex2 5y agoBubble sort obviously.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThere wasn't just one. Some defrag tools from the days of DOS would actually let you pick. A commonly used one was to try to place the contents of the same directory adjacent to each other on the disk surface, to minimize latency. I can't remember which it is, but either the center or the outside edge of a disk read faster, so another common trick was to place all the files necessary to boot the system there, to reduce boot times.
- rmahan 5y agoAngular velocity of the edge of the plate is higher, so it is faster than the center. However this only applies to plates that have the same data density on the inside and outside rings.
- chiph 5y agoDepends on the drive technology. For SSDs you want to avoid extra writes as those wear down the cells. For traditional hard drives you can consolidate empty space to reduce cluster waste, or go for broke and just place everything in order (most fun to watch). Probably the best way would be to group frequently accessed files near each other so the heads traveled less distance. So far as the algorithm, what I observed is the program would look at how much room was needed to place the next file, then clear that many blocks out of the way by moving them to the end of the drive. Then copy the blocks for the file to form a contiguous stretch of blocks. And repeat. You wanted to have as much free space as the largest file (plus a little), but I think some of them were able to move large files in pieces. Back in the days of Windows NT we had a network share with 8+ million files on it (a lot for the time) and we had a serious fragmentation problem, where it could take a second or more to read a file. Most of the defraggers just gave up, or weren't making any progress, but we eventually found one that worked (PerfectDisk, maybe?)
- achikin 5y agoAh, that defrag :(
- 6502nerdface 5y agoBest accompanied by https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/c-defrag https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/c-defrag
- danparsonson 5y agoReally nice :-) I'm hearing echoes of the Thunderforce IV OST (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLDBwMusg4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLDBwMusg4o) which can only be a good thing.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoSounds like their disk was very fragmented. Especially at 4:48
- willcipriano 5y agoGreat music for programming, really gets me in the mood
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 5y agoWhat's that base64 string all about? A naive decode just produces what looks like binary gibberish
- patal 5y agoThank you so much for this pointer! It's glorious.
- quickthrower2 5y agoCool, now i can create that linux partition!
- jolmg 5y agoIt keeps reading unused blocks instead of just the used ones. It's also writing way more blocks than there were originally, nearly filling the disk. That's good irony.
- masklinn 5y agoA bit like trying to defrag an SSD and shooting write amplification through the roof.
- pronoiac 5y agoI think instead of used or unused blocks, something to indicate how much per block were used would help.
- hawkesnest 5y agoThe version of Defrag from DOS 6.22 I remember differentiated between unused, partially used, and used (full) blocks. When you'd see a lot of partially used blocks get condensed into a few full blocks, it felt like your disk was getting SO tidy!
- quitit 5y agoit also doesn’t finish, i was hoping for the zoomie part - it never came.
- jaimex2 5y agoIs there a Windows 95 version? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_SDyLYq3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_SDyLYq3U
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoI stared at that for like an hour straight as a kid.
- kalleboo 5y agohttp://hultbergs.org/defrag/ http://hultbergs.org/defrag/
- jahlove 5y agoso satisfying to see a nicely defragged hard drive.
- sebastianconcpt 5y agoOh god yeah! hahaha I remember the pain (of the wait)
- tomxor 5y agoFor a second there I thought it was going to be under the "entertainment" menu.
- karim79 5y agoThis is gold. Thank you for sharing. I can remember when for me, Zen meant defragging my HDDs before I went to bed.
- carrja99 5y agoBrings back good memories... I used to go directly to the electronics section at Walmart while my parents shopped, start defrag on all the computers and then watch from the CD aisle with a smirk as an associate would come across them, exclaim "my god!" and restart the computers with a power off and on.
- James-Livesey 5y agoReminds me of that time when I went into the Apple Store and came up to a Mac, opened a window (idk I think it was something harmless like Finder), took a screenshot and then set that screenshot as the wallpaper. I'm sure there were many people that day who tried to close the 'uncloseable' window that was purely part of the background...
- joconde 5y agoI did that on a high school Windows lab PC, put the task bar on top of the screen, set it to auto-hide, and killed explorer.exe so the Desktop icons were only part of the background. A prof had to ask me to set it back because they couldn’t figure it out.
- noisy_boy 5y agoI imagined this entire sequence as a scene from The Simpsons, sound effect and all - thank you.
- kblev 5y agoThat's an obvious sign of OCD.
- mwest 5y agoHah! Something to replace https://www.twitch.tv/twitchdefrags/ https://www.twitch.tv/twitchdefrags/ which seems to have stopped broadcasting. Now we just need the right sound. :-)
- pixelat3d 5y agoYeah, sorry. My ISP decided it didn't want me to keep that alive anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- centerorbit 5y agoCreator here: I'm working with an audio engineer to offer a selection of sounds from WD to Seagate to SSD (current default). I first tried to just use old samples but the quality just wasn't good enough.
- randombits0 5y agoYou can recreate Micropolis SCSI drives by dropping a marble in a coffee can.
- simcop2387 5y agoI'd recommend some of the classic deathstar disks and their click of death, just so those of us with PTSD can relive it.
- r1ch 5y agoDon't recall if this was a deathstar but it certainly clicked. Warning, loud! https://r-1.ch/hdd.mp3 https://r-1.ch/hdd.mp3
- aidenn0 5y agoI associate click of death with IOMega drives
- Sunspark 5y agoI have a deathstar in the basement. It was working last time I placed it in its cardboard grave of obsolescence. Who knows what would happen if I powered it up today? I don't really know what to do with all my old hard drives. I love SSDs because they don't vibrate and make noise.
- ioman 5y agoI remember the sense of deep satisfaction and virtue when I defragged my hard drive. Then I learned FreeBSD. I kept trying to figure out how to defrag the partitions. When I learned that the filesystem took care of it continuously my mind was blown.
- cable2600 5y agoSO did OS/2. People wanted the defrag of Windows 95 or Norton Utilities but OS/2 defragged in the background. SSD drives don't need to be defragged.
- sundvor 5y agoNVME drives still like some TLC optimisation, i.e running TRIM on a regular basis.
- flatiron 5y agoMy mid 90s is FreeBSD. Two floppies and a 14.4k on the install. 486 66dx2 with 20 megs of ram and the thing cooked. I used that server up until 2002 as a proxy server (this is before the age of updating software for security). I finally didn’t need it, it simply never broke.
- xtracto 5y agoFor me it was late 90s. A friend of the family bought for me Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CD set, with all the stickers and other goodies. They sent it all the way to my godforsaken small town in Mexico. As a 12 year old it was soooo cool. I remember spending hours installing (incluing configuring and compiling the kernel in an ncurses based interface). I printed the whole FreeBSD manual and my mom bound it for me. Great times!
- op00to 5y agoWould you have been able to get FreeBSD otherwise? Like, mid 90s I remember downloading Slackware from a BBS. Floppy after floppy. Was that available in your area at the time?
- fumar 5y agoI hadn't thought about defragging a hard drive in years. What happens on mobile OS? Do they run routine defrag processes in the background?
- anyfoo 5y agoFor a few decades now, suitable filesystems work in a way that makes defragmentation essentially unnecessary. I don't you ever really had to defragment on Linux, by the time it came into existence its filesystem was already advanced enough (though I know nothing about ext, which existed briefly before ext2, and neither about the minix filesystem that Linux used briefly even before).
- JaimeThompson 5y agoYou should give "How to Fragment Your File System" by a lot of people a read. http://csis.pace.edu/~jyuan2/paper/betrfs5.pdf http://csis.pace.edu/~jyuan2/paper/betrfs5.pdf "In this article, we demonstrate that modern file systems can still suffer from fragmentation under representative workloads, and we describe a simple method for quickly inducing aging. Our results suggest that fragmentation can be a first-order performance concern—some file systems slow down by over 20x over the course of our experiments. We show that fragmentation causes performance declines on both hard drives and SSDs, when there is plentiful cache available, and even on large disks with ample free space."
- anyfoo 5y agoGuess I was myself part of what the second sentence mentions: "System implementers and users alike treat aging as a solved problem." :)
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThe web is full of people shouting "_____ filesytem doesn't get fragmented!" Apparently they've never let a filesystem get above 70% full or so, especially one on a fileserver that has seen years of daily use by a dozen+ people. I've heard it for HFS, HFS+, XFS, ext3, ext4, etc and every time it was an lie. Every filesystem fragments after regular use unless you have a fuckton of free space. It's pretty hard to justify to one's bosses over-provisioning disk space to enough of a degree to render fragmentation unlikely, and users just expand their data to fit it anyway.
- willis936 5y agosudo e4defrag / sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeros; sudo rm -f /zeros While write intensive, I run this on my ZFS VMs on occasion to keep the zstd compression ratio high. No pretty interface, but it's still satisfying when I see the volume's compression ratio is close to entropy. Even in 2021. Even with all-flash.
- geoka9 5y agoNo need to sync before rm'ing?
- willis936 5y agoNot afaik. The dd operation returns when the virtual disk is full and linux won't run anything after the semicolon until the previous command returns. I'm not running any async disk behavior on the client.
- yoursunny 5y agoIn case the second sudo wants to ask for password but there's no disk space for logging, it's safer to: sudo bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/zeros; rm -f /zeros'
- willis936 5y agoI typically don't put sudos in my scripts but have found filling all free space is particularly hazardous. I ran into rm permissions issues once and had to sneak my way into a recovery environment to remove the file. I haven't ran into sudo timing out during the zeroing, but it is a hazard. This is a good tip.
- tambourine_man 5y agoAny effects on life time of the SSD?
- willis936 5y ago
- rilindo 5y agoDuring my teen years playing around with my PCs, this was literally my ASMR. EDIT: I realize that it needs the sounds of the hard drive itself being defraged.
- gigel82 5y agoIt's not the same :) I remember the whole experience was cathartic, and my DOS PC definitely felt faster after doing (though it most likely wasn't).
- hinkley 5y agoI had a list of things to do at work if it was mid- to late-afternoon and I just wasn't 'feeling it' for the task I was assigned. Update documentation, research new releases of our tools/libraries, defrag my hard drive. Compilers really were happier with some defragmentation (half of which they probably created in the first place).
- phist_mcgee 5y agoRemember hearing the sound of the physical disk spinning, whirring and clunking? It felt like an actual machine.
- jedberg 5y agoCan you imagine how powerful dfrag could have been if we had the internet back then? There could be a public list of files that don't change or get deleted a lot, a list of files that change a lot, that get deleted a lot, etc. Then it could not only regroup files into contiguous blocks, but it could put the most stable files first so that subsequent defrags are faster!
- dylan604 5y agoBut you don't want dull files that don't change often and only get read once at boot first. First on an HDD was read faster than last. You want file that accessed frequently first.
- jedberg 5y agoHmmm good point. I guess we’d want to flip it.
- hinkley 5y agoThroughput and seek time were the big problem. You probably want a few alternating stripes of files and free space. Or do what most people did, which is keep a mostly empty hard drive.
- dylan604 5y agoYou must have a different definition of most. Everyone I knew was always needing a new drive because the current one was full. Empty drive? What's that? The thing in the box. 30 seconds after turning it on, it was 80% full!
- usefulcat 5y agoIt depends on what you’re optimizing for; reducing boot times is not an uncommon goal.
- frozenport 5y agoWhat? We had the internet back then...
- Iv 5y agoI need that as a screensaver! Oh wait, we don't have screensavers anymore either...
- mattowen_uk 5y agoI do. My desktop PC (running Windows 10) goes black, and then floats a nice digital clock and date around the screen in white. It does this for about 5 minutes, and then my monitor goes to sleep. It's a nice transition between the two states.
- helph67 5y agoVopt921 is an excellent defrag utility for Win 10 / 8 / 7 / Vista / XP. It also includes many handy clean up options to remove lots of Win generated junk. The late author has made it freely available to all. https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/vopt.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/vopt.html
- Laforet 5y agoDo you know if it defrags MFT in NTFS partitions? Asking because I've ran into issues with MFT fragmentation before and it took me a long time to find tools that will actually attempt to fix it and the process took a long time.
- dehrmann 5y agoThis was actually a really poor approach, right? Wouldn't you want files that change frequently to be padded at the end to limit future fragmentation?
- monocasa 5y agoIt bothers me that it's mainly moving unused blocks around.
- MaxikCZ 5y agoThis. The W symbol for Write isn't actually shown, and I have a feeling (not sure) that sometimes symbol S appears instead of r, not sure what that is.
- pizza234 5y agoThis is actually correct behavior; you can observe it in an original video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRlgjMmdbV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRlgjMmdbV0. "Unused" blocks is a probably misleading terms - "partially used" is more precise. The simulation performs significantly more reads from "Unused" blocks, so I'm not sure, if it's exaggerated/incorrectly modeled, of if the virtual disk is an edge case (I suspect the former case). Here's another video, with the same behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syir9mdRk9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syir9mdRk9s.
- monocasa 5y agoI guess I'm not seeing it in that video. The video you've posted is pretty clearly reading from use blocks and writing to unused blocks, in contrast to this webapp.
- pizza234 5y agoThe screenshot [here](https://imgur.com/a/HS0C7ex https://imgur.com/a/HS0C7ex) is taken at second 8, from the central area of the video; it shows an `r` block. If you play at 0.25x from second 8 (https://youtu.be/syir9mdRk9s?t=8 https://youtu.be/syir9mdRk9s?t=8), you'll notice that the `r` is displayed on top of an "unused" block.
- themadturk 5y agoI just showed this to my 32 year old son. He used to sit on my lap and watch as my hard drive defragged. Made him smile.
- buggeryorkshire 5y agoThat's awesome!
- aitchnyu 5y agoI'm 32 and at 10 years old I loved watching Windows 98 defrag. <ramble> I also loved Flashget downloading files 10 threads at a time. 10 mb resumable download in 5 hours was amazing for me. A few years later I was ricing Linux with a dangerous tool that prepends binaries with its shared objects dependencies so that every program launch is a contiguous read. Ubuntu then added it as post-trigger to its package manager. There was a hellish period between when Ubuntu removed that trigger and I finally got an SSD (Indian markets still get HDDs).
- cmpb 5y agoI (30) also just sent this to my dad. It made him very happy as we reminisced about all the old machines we've gone through over the decades. Thank you for spending such quality time with your son
- dfsegoat 5y agoThis is great...There was nothing worse than seeing the dreaded "B" symbol for bad blocks. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lxZyxxHOw3Y/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lxZyxxHOw3Y/maxresdefault.jpg
- donatj 5y agoI am old enough to remember when "defrag days" were part of my job. Literally nearly an entire work day lost spent waiting for defrag to finish on my FAT32 hard drive. We used some program with a very minimal UI that was supposed to do it faster/better than the utility built into Windows.
- mrich 5y agoI wish ZFS had a defrag option. On a server I run that would allow me to move all the used blocks to the beginning of storage and use the rest for hypervisor level snapshots. But I'll still take ZFS over any other file system :)
- snvzz 5y agoTurning chaos into order has some appeal. Defrag is relaxing and hands off, but reverse engineering is a hard drug.
- Sunspark 5y agoI defragged a SSD partition recently. First time in MANY years I ran a defrag utility. There is still a reason to do it.. if you want to shrink a partition using stock utilities then you need contiguous free space.
- Someone 5y agoI don’t know whether the tools exist, but that doesn’t require defragging. It just requires moving stuff from the top occupied blocks into free space lower down. That’s less work and somewhat easier to program. There still will be edge cases where doing that increases the size of directory structures, so it’s not fully trivial.
- sumtechguy 5y agoFor windows 10 'defrag' can do this. defrag /X If I remember from the last time I used it, it is not nice about it. It may create fragments. It consolidates the free space to the end of the drive. Does not always work. Especially if the drive in question is active.
- chasil 5y agoBtrFS can actually shrink while moving impacted files. I think the target space is just rebalanced.
- sandos 5y agoArrgh, those "unmoveable" blocks.. I used to try all sort of hacks to get rid of them.
- Arcorann 5y agoReminds me of zFRAG [0], which I found had an update recently to add bad sectors. The game allows you to both defrag automatically and manually (by dragging and dropping). [0] https://losttraindude.itch.io/zfrag https://losttraindude.itch.io/zfrag
- praptak 5y agoUnmovable files! I remember that DOS boot sector did not understand FAT, so some files had to be in exact locations. TBH I'm a bit uncertain on how today's GRUB goes from the boot sector, which is too small to understand filesystems, to a beast that can load the kernel from practically any filesystem. I think that GRUB 1 used the 32kB DOS compatibility region to store whatever didn't fit in the MBR. The 32kB was enough for it to boot itself to a state where it understands filesystems.
- Dylan16807 5y agoFor BIOS boot, these days basically all partitions are aligned to a multiple of a megabyte, leaving basically the same gap after the MBR but bigger, so GRUB puts its core in the same place. For UEFI boot, it's the firmware's job to understand the partition table and FAT32 so that it can open up the boot partition and make a list of bootable files. Then it can run one or give the user a menu. So GRUB just has to put a single file in the right directory.
- erulabs 5y agoHah, makes me miss my grandpa
- qwerty456127 5y agoI would like such a screensaver but the Bs would cause me anxiety. I lived long enough to get accustomed to regular defragmentation (never used this-looking app though, only SpeedDisk and later Defraggler) but not long enough to consider bad clusters presence a norm - they always meant a catastrophe for me.
- cmarschner 5y agoOn a tangent, I‘m surprised how much SD cards are failing to keep my photos intact. I found a couple old ones and saved them to cloud storage but it was too late - at least 10% of the jpegs are screwed up with artifacts, some of them are not readable. I wonder of these people had ever heard if redundancy? Is it cosmic rays?
- hansel_der 5y agoi feel like the whole naming "Secure Digital" and "Solid State Disk" is specifically chosen to distract from the fact that there is absolutely nothing "secure" or "solid" about the underlying technology (tiny capacitors that WILL discharge on their own). disclamiar: did write benchmarks with sd-cards in the past and was astonished by the failure rates. There also was (is?) little correlation to price, seemed like there was a huge variance in the quality of different batches of memory chips.
- simonjgreen 5y agoI'd really love to have this as a screensaver. Such memories sat staring at these screens!
- nottorp 5y ago... but it would probably be an electron app and drain your battery ...
- junon 5y agoAnd here's the Win95 version: http://hultbergs.org/defrag/ http://hultbergs.org/defrag/
- skytreader 5y agoMy goodness was defragging really that mechanically loud or is this exaggerated for effect? For such a long time (as in, well into the tail end of Windows XP) I was stuck with an old Pentium computer that could handle Windows 98SE at most. Had maybe 2GB of HDD to work with which sounded luxurious to me until my father was issued a 4GB flash drive at work. I defragged this every first Sunday of the month to keep things running smooth. Ofc the effect might as well be purely psychological but hey, as I said it did last me a long time. The mechanical sounds I remember are finer, not like pop snoring no? :)
- ktpsns 5y agoYes, my hard disc at that time (similar experience) was more silent. The sound is either exaggerated or from some even older 5.25" disc.
- wazoox 5y agoI still have in a drawer some 80 GB and 250 GB Maxtor drives that are really that loud. I remember when I replaced by 80GB root disk with a 1 TB HGST one, the sudden silence in my office...
- junon 5y agoI miss it to be honest. All of the computer-ey sounds made it a lot of fun, and it's not something I thought I'd miss until they were gone. Every once in a while I hear my AIO spin up and some water start moving around and that's nice (not sure if it's supposed to do that but it's done it since day one). But that's all I have to look forward to other than the fan noise.
- 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sponaugle 5y agoThe only thing even more satisfying then defrag was to optimize your drive interleaving. I have fond memories of using SpinRite II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite) to optimize the interleaving on my overRLLd ST225s and ST251s on a Perstore controller! To think 30MBs was such a huge amount of storage.
- bmn__ 5y agoIf anyone could find the User Friendly strip where sysadmin guy defrags the cinema, I would be very grateful.
- joshspankit 5y agoThank you to the dev. I was actually just thinking about this this morning. After finally getting past single and dual floppy systems I used to defrag my 40MB disk every night and felt rightness with the world. I remember wishing I could choose which files go where because of outer parts of the platter being faster than the inner parts. Whether that was true in practice didn’t matter, just that feeling of fully tuning my machine.