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- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!cleveland.Freenet.Edu!bx304
- From: bx304@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeff Epler)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
- Subject: Re: New Stacker
- Date: 15 Sep 1992 01:15:35 GMT
- Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
- Lines: 35
- Message-ID: <193dfnINNou6@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
- References: <1992Sep14.193532.4713@microware.com> <Steven_P._Oliver.036w@bearsden.UUCP> <1992Sep10.165416.14551@rei.com>
- Reply-To: bx304@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeff Epler)
- NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu
-
-
- In a previous article, kris@microware.com (Kris Hoffmeyer) says:
-
- >In article <1992Sep10.165416.14551@rei.com> fox@rei.com (Fuzzy Fox) writes:
- >>
- >>A quick note on Norton's FS -- It will tell you that there is unused
- >>slack space on the Stacker drive, but what Norton doesn't realize is
- >>that Stacker actually re-uses this slack space during its compression.
- >>So any figures you see on slack space are reported by unaware software.
- >>Stacker drives have very little slack space at all.
- >
- >I don't understand how stacker does not have slack space...
- >Stacker does allow you to set the file block size, but it installs
- >at 8K blocks, right? So if a file or it's last block is less than
- >8K, the rest is "slack", isn't it? I could see Norton's FS getting
- >confused and being inaccurate in reporting slack space, but how does
- >Stacker fix the "slack" issue...?
-
- Stacker internally allocates in 512-byte clusters. So, for an 8192-byte
- cluster, compression can be 1.0:1 (Takes at least 15x512+1 bytes to
- store) to 16.0:1 (Takes <=512 bytes to store).
-
- Incidentally, it appears that Stacker (And possibly superstor) uses this
- to help inflate its compression figures. SCHECK reports the file space
- as number of clusters used, which is a 4096-byte average per file. So
- on my drive (Mostly ZIPS, I know I'm silly.) it claims 1.4:1 compression
- but it's only about 1.1:1 right now.
-
- I'm less satisfied with stacker now than I was before I realized this
- inflation of its compression figure... <sigh>
- --
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