Just a quick one today as I'm feeling like sheeeeeet.

FileSieve 4.20 is shaping up to be a pretty hefty release as it contains the most changes for the 4 series to date. Because of that, I'm adding more changes, and even more changes. Gonna break a record? Do it properly.

Today's (partial, as I was away for a lot of the day) task is to try and get the Prescanning split into multiple threads.

Before FileSieve does its sieving thing, it has a Prescan stage where it gathers information on all of the files to be processed. This is currently a sequential process and can take a while as it needs to traverse the file system and grab various pieces of metadata.

Now, what if the files reside on different drives? We can portion out all Source Items (a directory, essentially) onto different threads depending on which drive they reside on. This needs a bit more than simply creating a list of Source Items per drive letter due to logical and physical drives. That is, a single drive may have multiple logical partitions, and we don't want to thrash the disk because we're too dumb to realise all of those partitions share the same drive heads.

This Prescan threading feature has been sat dormant in FileSieve for quite a while as I didn't get around to implementing the are-drive-letters-on-the-same-drive logic. Over the next couple of days I'm going to see if I can determine how feasible this is; I definitely do not want to rely on Windows Management Instrumentation as the WMI infrastructure is one bloaty mutha - it takes literal seconds to instantiate for the first time.