[BASpro]

So how many write operations would have occurred ...

Previously, I was concerned about the number of erase/write cycles that would occur over a disk cell as the cleaner created a new file that replaced the old file in order to fill the disk partition (110G in my case).

So, I calculated through use of a spreadsheet the number of times the program would cycle in order to fill the disk. I executed the cleaner program on my workstation which completed the whole process in 60 seconds. The process was completed in 13 cycles for just under 104G; my laptop disk would have become full at the start of the 14th cycle. That means there would have been only 14 erase/re-write cycles maximum; assuming there are no other write tasks occurring - I'm not a disk expert. The observation I made previously about file sizes getting smaller was simply due to the computer generating a new file that began small as it generated its way to it's new larger size.

Here are the passes and the file sizes generated in the previous cleaner program:

Pass#---junk2.bin (bytes)---junk.bin (bytes)
1-------------------------------1,024
1-------2,048-------------------4,096
2-------8,192-------------------16,384
3-------32,768------------------65,536
4-------131,072-----------------262,144
5-------524,288-----------------1,048,576
6-------2,097,152---------------4,194,304
7-------8,388,608---------------16,777,216
8-------33,554,432--------------67,108,864
9-------134,217,728-------------268,435,456
10------536,870,912-------------1,073,741,824
11------2,147,483,648-----------4,294,967,296
12------8,589,934,592-----------17,179,869,184
13------34,359,738,368----------68,719,476,736

So, I have confidence in saying that running the previous cleaner would not have been significant in generating wear on the disk.

All the best, Mass