What an excellent question. Not many people are as perceptive as you. As a matter of fact it does make a difference, starting at the 80 gigabyte 7200 rpm range and it was part of the Microsoft suite of nanocode system support that had to be worked on starting with Windows 2000. It is an automatic system service to move data sectors with low zero counts automatically to maintain 'Odd-Set Symmetry' known as OSS in the Windows world. Macintosh has something similar, I believe it's known as 'Bipolar Symmetry' or BS.
It is rumored that terrorists are working on various ways to defeat this part of the underlying system software, either by a worm or a simple user hoax that will lead to the disablement of high volume high speed drives. As larger and larger and faster and faster hard drives come to the market over the next couple years, you'll probably hear more about this iss.
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What an excellent question. Not many people are as perceptive as you. As a matter of fact it does make a difference, starting at the 80 gigabyte 7200 rpm range and it was part of the Microsoft suite of nanocode system support that had to be worked on starting with Windows 2000. It is an automatic system service to move data sectors with low zero counts automatically to maintain 'Odd-Set Symmetry' known as OSS in the Windows world. Macintosh has something similar, I believe it's known as 'Bipolar Symmetry' or BS.
It is rumored that terrorists are working on various ways to defeat this part of the underlying system software, either by a worm or a simple user hoax that will lead to the disablement of high volume high speed drives. As larger and larger and faster and faster hard drives come to the market over the next couple years, you'll probably hear more about this iss.