One way to use contiguous allocation of the disk and not suffer from holes is to compact the disk every time a file is removed. Since all files are contiguous, copying a file requires a seek and a rotational delay to read the file , followed by the transfer at full speed. Writing the file back requires the same work. Assuming a seek time of 5 msec , a rotational delay of 4 msec , a transfer rate of 8MB/sec and an average file size of 8KB, how long does it take to read a file into main memory then write it back to the disk at a new location? Using these numbers , how long would it take to compact a 8GB disk? Would that be a good idea?
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