Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!think!ames!ptsfa!ihnp4!cuae2!killer!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Close Call (Supra hard drive) Message-ID: <411@sugar.UUCP> Date: Sun, 19-Jul-87 10:32:06 EDT Article-I.D.: sugar.411 Posted: Sun Jul 19 10:32:06 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jul-87 21:12:56 EDT References: <1385@crash.CTS.COM> <2122@cbmvax.UUCP> Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX Lines: 30 Keywords: Amiga hard disk Supra horror story Summary: Just great. > Ya know, some people complain about the poor performance of AmigaDOS, > but ask yourself something - have you ever lost a disk because of > the DOS? In my experience it has ALWAYS been media failure, or > copy protection failure. > > Paul Higginbottom. So the only criterion we should apply to a file suystem is whether or not it crashes the disk. Great. Yes, of course I disagree. Speed is important. It shouldn't take more time to get a directory listing than to read a file of the same size. This means that on the Amiga floppy you should not have to do more than one disk access to get the current directory until the total size of all the file headers in the current directory exceeds 5K. At the very least you should *attempt* to put the file headers contiguously after the directory, to the point of not allocating any other blocks on a directory track until there simply isn't any more room elsewhere. Ideally you should do a UNIX-style file system with preferential caching of inodes, then directories, then files. It's also probably a good idea not to cache large files that are being read sequentially. Yeh, and how about sequential block prefetch and disk seek optimisation. Then you get loadseg to request all blocks at once, to cut out the dreaded "run grind" you get after you've run a program (or selected it form the workbench) and then thoughtlessly typed another command that accesses the same disk. Of course, your mileage may vary. -- -- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!seismo!soma!uhnix1!sugar!peter (I said, NO PHOTOS!)