Since NTFSPROGS project is still alive, I wanted to place an acute request,
allowing to bring this program to current requirements:
There were several requests made on Gparted forum
(
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=14948) over time to
Resize partition without copying it's content. I was suggested to
request NTFSPROGS developers to consider updating the program to
address this long overdue issue.
Everyone who uses hard drives knows well a remarkable trend: their
reliability drops with drive size increase, even for Green slower
spinning models. Todays 2-3 Tb HDs are far less reliable than their
smaller counterparts just a few years ago. I'm not even talking about
10-20 years old models - they still spin today without any issues
while purchased 1-year ago HDs frequently fail one after another. And
replacement refurb drives often work no longer than one extra month.
It becomes a major task for each PC owner to use existing HD lifespan
resource more efficiently.
Situation also changed with energy consumption and efficiency trends
around the world . We must be responsible citizens of this planet, and
take good care about spending its resources in the most efficient way.
In view of these trends, current situation when increasing a partition
to the left results in unnecessary copying of all its content to the
left is no longer acceptable. For large drives with 2+ Tb of data such
ops significantly decrease their lifespan and waste plenty of precious
energy for no objective reason. Its especially true for lower quality
consumer drive models, despite they often hold massive video & movie
collections that frequently need expending.
Its a typical scenario, when a new large drive owner formats it
originally with several partitions only to find later, some of them
can be safely deleted to free more space for remaining ones. That's
where we all face an acute problem of how to avoid copying large movie
or file collections to the left at merging a previous and current
partitions. Those of us, who gone through multiple drive warranty
repairs understand very well what such ops usually entail.
I ask NTFSPROGS developers to add an algorithm that would increase a
partition to the left without copying all its content to the left. The
time is long overdue for the task. There is absolutely no need to move
huge data massive of constantly growing in size drive models, waste
precious energy and spend limited HD lifespan and significant user
time for literally no objective reason. A joint switchable algorithm
can be developed to resize partitions in any direction in a similar
fashion. It will not result in increased program maintenance time, if
done in a smart way. The differences in resizing a partition to the
left from its END and BEGINNING aren't that significant code wise.
