My checksums are being created/verified rather slowly. Whats up?
A couple of important factors can affect the speed of checksum’s operation. In my experience, aside from the obvious influence of disk and processor speed, the biggest slow-down is caused by file fragmentation.. If checksum can grab the whole file in one chunk, checksumming is lightening fast. If it has to grab it from many pieces, scattered all over the disk, this can slow things down considerably. If the file was downloaded by some sort of p2p software; bittorent, eDonkey, etc., chances are it will be extremely fragmented, sometimes into thousands of parts, scattered all over the disk. Obviously this produces some I/O overhead, even waiting for the disk head to reposition. If speed is most important to you, defragment the drive. The best way to defragment a (non-system) drive, is to move ALL the files off it to a blank drive, and then copy them back again. There are also many disk defragmentation utilities available; Windows has one built in. Although not so good as a copy-wipe-copy,
