Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!psuvax1!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!mailrus!utah-gr!utah-cs!cs.utexas.edu!sm.unisys.com!csun!csuna!acphssrw
From: acphssrw@csuna.UUCP (Stephen R. Walton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Amiga floppies (was: Re: Blitter vs. 80386)
Message-ID: <1372@csuna.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 88 20:05:56 GMT
References: <1800@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU> <4479@cbmvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: acphssrw@csuna.UUCP (Stephen R. Walton)
Organization: California State University, Northridge
Lines: 17

In article <4479@cbmvax.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
>in article <1800@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU>, cheung@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU
>(Wilson Cheung) says:
>> Why is the disk drive so slow? 
>
>Are you still floppy based?  The PCs I've used around here (XTs and ATs) have a
>pretty miserable disk performance when running similar things.

Amen to that.  The ONLY thing PC's do faster than the Amiga is
directory listings and other wild-card-search related things.  And
there're lots of ways around that on the Amiga: a "fastdir" program
such as Rob Peck's, or a disk cacher which only caches directory
blocks (BlitzDisk can do this, takes minimal memory, and it comes
"free" with TxEd Plus).  In fact, I ran some disk performance
benchmarks some time ago, and the Amiga's _floppies_ were competitive
with an XT's _hard disk_ in most respects;  they were about equal in
reading/writing long files.