Hi Greg, Keep in mind that the file system manages the mechanics of a drive, thus the file system does have an effect on the success of a drive, as does other factors, like how fragmented your data is on the drive, as if your data is very fragmented, the drive will have to work much harder. This is just one of the ways that the file system, and manner in which data is stored can effect the life expectancy of a drive. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2007 5:40 PM Subject: Re: A computer issue, how should I deal with this? Best solution? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 11:16:27AM -0500, Glenn Ervin wrote: > As far as NTFS being more reliable than FAT32, I would argue on personal > experience that I have had more drives go bad that were running NTFS than > those running FAT32. While I don't mean to, and can't dispute your personal experience, as far as I know, there is no connection what so ever between the file system on a drive, and whether the drive goes bad or not, I don't follow this line of reasoning. That's like someone saying they got a flat tire, because they were driving in a rain storm. > I have owned more drives formatted with FAT32, so I should have > experienced > more FAT32 file system problems, yet I have experienced the opposite. This looks logical on the surface, but really isn't if you think about it. Sticking with the car analogy, that's like saying that if you drive the same model/year of car for an equal amount of time, both cars will use exactly the same amount of gas. On the surface, this looks logical, but really isn't if you stop and consider it, (I won't explain why here. Coming back to the hd and fs comparison, the only way to test such a hypothesis, would be to have 2 drives of the same make and model, produced in the same factory on the same date, one formated with fat32, the other with ntfs. Even then, your results still couldn't be said to be accurate, because the workmanship on each drive might have varied, the materials, although the same, used to construct the drives might have varied in some small way, and the amount of use each drive got would most likely vary as well. Keep in mind that modern drives have more heads, and more cylinders than older drives, while still being confined to the same physical size limit. Therefore, there are more heads, and more media in a newer drive that could fail, as opposed to the older drives. It is also possible that due to newer drives being internally more complex then older drives (see previous head/cylinder comparison), that quality control today isn't as thorough as it once used to be. In addition to more complexity, another reason for poorer quality control is that the size of drives is increasing, and prices are coming down steadily. So, companies making these drives either could be expecting people to upgrade more often, thus they aren't concerned with the drive having an especially long lifetime, or they could purposefully be making more flaky drives, so as to force people to buy newer drives, thus keeping their business going. I am only proposing a theory here, I'm not saying that this is what manufactures are actually doing, though they might be. > Now this can be due to mechanical problems un-relat ed to the file system, > but it is often unclear whether the hard-drive crash was due to an > inability > for the file system being able to repair itself. You said it yourself, a hard drive is a mechanical, (well actually, an electro-mechanical) device. If it mechanically breaks, and crashes, no file system put on it, before, or somehow after the crash, would bring that drive magically back to life. As for the inability of a file system to repair itself causing the drive to crash hardware wise, this is something else that doesn't make sense, to me at least. Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGfvLa7s9z/XlyUyARAmKfAKCpOqomieK3EELD8VO3lStdPbF/4gCglSHn bhqImSZ+e6gBNLWzkgYFn0A= =FEjp -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
