disk

I assume Windows has a similar concept to Linux's page cache for storing in memory data from disks, like files, executables and dynamic libraries. I wonder if it is possible at all to disable such cache or to the very least to clear/flush it. Damon This is called Standby List under windows. You can purge it globally, or for one volume, or for one file handle. Globally You can do it using a readily available program from Microsoft Technet, by selecting Empty → Empty Standby List Programmatically, you can achieve the same thing using the undocumented NtSetSystemInformation function, for details

I'm using the DriveInfo class in my C# project to retrieve the available bytes on given drives. How to I correctly convert this number into Mega- or Gigabytes? Dividing by 1024 will not do the job I guess. The results always differ from those shown in the Windows-Explorer. Adam Davis 1024 is correct for usage in programs. The reason you may be having differences is likely due to differences in what driveinfo reports as "available space" and what windows considers available space. Note that only drive manufacturers use 1,000. Within windows and most programs the correct scaling is 1024. Also,

What is the difference between sequential write and random write in case of :- 1)Disk based systems 2)SSD [Flash Device ] based systems When the application writes something and the information/data needs to be modified on the disk then how do we know whether it is a sequential write or a random write.As till this point a write cannot be distinguished as "sequential" or "random".The write is just buffered and then applied to the disk when we will flush the buffer. Please correct me if I am wrong. When people talk about sequential vs random writes to a file, they're generally drawing a

I use the code below to get the physical disk size , but the size returned is not correct. I've checked the size with other tools. The code below reports Total disk space: 8.249.955.840 bytes and it should be Total disk space: 8.254.390.272 bytes How can I retrieve the actual/correct physical disk size? Tested on USB drives and normal hard drives. The code is long, here separate it in parts to show. The structure: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] internal struct DiskGeometry { public long Cylinders; public int MediaType; public int TracksPerCylinder; public int SectorsPerTrack; public int

I would like to display a list of processes (Windows, C++) and how much they are reading and writing from the disk in KB/sec. The Resource Monitor of Windows 7 has the ability so I should be able to do the same. However I have unable to find a relevant API-call or find anything in the perfmon counters. Could anyone point me in the direction? You can call GetProcessIoCounters to get overall disk I/O data per process - you'll need to keep track of deltas and converting to time-based rate yourself. This API will tell you total number of I/O operations as well as total bytes. WMI can do it, as

Erasing programs such as Eraser recommend overwriting data maybe 36 times. As I understand it all data is stored on a hard drive as 1s or 0s. If an overwrite of random 1s and 0s is carried out once over the whole file then why isn't that enough to remove all traces of the original file? A hard drive bit which used to be a 0, and is then changed to a '1', has a slightly weaker magnetic field than one which used to be a 1 and was then written to 1 again. With sensitive equipment the previous contents of each bit can be discerned with a reasonable degree of accuracy, by measuring the slight