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- Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32
- Path: sparky!uunet!microsoft!hexnut!alistair
- From: alistair@microsoft.com (Alistair Banks)
- Subject: Re: Info on NTFS internals ?
- Message-ID: <1992Nov09.043511.9921@microsoft.com>
- Date: 09 Nov 92 04:35:11 GMT
- Organization: Microsoft Corporation
- References: <1992Nov2.164603.21540@decuac.dec.com> <1992Nov04.053326.643@microsoft.com> <1992Nov5.155204.19448@decuac.dec.com>
- Lines: 28
-
- In article <1992Nov5.155204.19448@decuac.dec.com> baker@westsd.dco.dec.com (Art Baker) writes:
- >
- >It would be possible, I believe to desribe the algorithms/methods used
- >by the NTFS driver without revealing anything that would put Microsoft
- >at a competitive disadvantage.
- >
- >My own employer, Digital Equipment, has published an entire book
- >describing both the on-disk block structure *and* the interaction of the
- >Files-11 XQP for VMS. Similar documentation exists for OSF/1 and most
- >other flavors of UNIX.
- >
- >As to why: Because it's nearly impossible to write high-performance
- >code that treats the entire disk-subsystem as a black box. This is going
- >to be particularly true if/when WNT becomes the OS of choice on large
- >server-machines. In these kinds of disk-intensive environments,
- >information about the disk-subsystem's allocation strategies, locking
- >policies, buffering schemes, etc, becomes crucial to squeezing the greatest
- >number of I/O's out of the system. A simple list of file-system features
- >does not meet this need.
-
- Thank you for the description - I understand much better what you're asking
- for now. As someone later refers to, we did previously write such an article
- about the mechanisms of HPFS. There are many articles yet to be written
- about Windows NT, even though Inside Windows NT is out! This certainly
- appears to be one such article - To my knowledge, this hasn't
- been written yet, so I'll ask that it does get written and published
-
- -- Alistair
-