info-mac@uw-beaver.UUCP (10/14/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
We have had a 10 Mb Tecmar MacDrive here for a while. On the first day
we had it, I tried to build a nice system of folders and filenames that
would allow useable listing from both the Finder and the Manx shell. I
did finally manage to do that (although I found out that the finder
crashes if you try to put more than about 50 files in a folder), and
now that everything is set up certain disk intensive programs do run
noticably faster. But if you're going to be changing your (hah) file
system frequently, the Finder will not do. Here were my impressions on
the day I did all that folder building:
>From winkler Sat Oct 6 00:20:30 1984
To: info-mac-incoming
Subject: tecmar
Status: R
Tecmar should be prosecuted for false advertising. People are going
to go into computer stores and see the 10 Mb MacDrive working about
3 times as fast as a floppy and reporting 9000K free and they will
conclude that they can both use the remaining space and continue to
enjoy the increased speed, which would be a very attractive combination.
Wrong. The fact is that as soon as you start to take advantage of the
drive's capacity, Finder operations become intolerably slow.
Intolerable means they take more than half an hour. Dropping a single
file into a folder takes over 10 seconds.
I made the mistake of choosing clean up earlier today. I waited more
than half an hour for it and then left. I came back 7 hours later and
it had finally finished. But then when I tried to move some files into
a folder, it added insult to injury and crashed. The thing is
rebooting now and I'll check back tomorrow to see if it is up.
This is on a Fat Mac, by the way. I'm sure there would be additional
problems on a little mac. The TecMar manual mentions that little macs
frequently report "not enough memory to..." when working with their drive.
I have about 200 files on the disk now, and although the Tecmar always
allocates at least 20k per file (no matter how small the file!), there
are still about 4 megabytes free. So you see that although the storage
is liberally wasted, you'll still never be able to use all of it. It's
only a little over half full now and already performance has plunged well
below that of floppies (or card readers, for that matter). Perhaps if
you only wanted to have a single 8 megabyte file, that would work better.
But the finder is not up to managing a 10 meg drive in the usual way.
Apple is promising a new finder and Tecmar is promising new software that
will enable a cache that is currently unused in their drive. I think I'll
save my money until then.
Dan.
---------------------------
That was the first day. We're happier now with the drive than we were
then because after the initial struggle to set it up it has worked
moderately well for a few things. But if you use any application that
creates many files (like the Manx shell and editor), then the next time
the finder starts up it uses an amazingly slow (seems like O(2^2^2^2^n))
algorithm to update its DeskTop file. (Actually, Manx provides a
little utility which we haven't tried yet to help get around this.)
Also, the MacDrive connects to the modem port and even when MacTerminal
is set to go through the printer port it hasn't worked for us unless we
turned of the hard drive.
And start up time is slower because you need to boot from a floppy and
then wait for the finder to get over the shock of finding so many files
on one volume. If you're developing software and find yourself rebooting
every time your program crashes, this again could be a problem.
Remember that the Mac uses a flat file system. (Folders exist only in
the Finder's imagination.) So every file on the 10 Mb drive must have a
unique name (and you probably thought choosing meaningful variable
names in a program was hard). And the Open File dialog box will
sometimes show you over 100 file names to choose from. But don't
worry, it won't get too much worse than that the because finder cannot
handle many more files. We have about 180 files now and already there
are severe performance problems for some operations and certain
arrangements of those files in folders cause crashes.
So we think that the Tecmar is a nice piece of hardware but that there are
certain applications for which the current software (finder, flat file
system) is quite inadequate. info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) We have had a 10 Mb Tecmar MacDrive here for a while. On the first day we had it, I tried to build a nice system of folders and filenames that would allow useable listing from both the Finder and the Manx shell. I did finally manage to do that (although I found out that the finder crashes if you try to put more than about 50 files in a folder), and now that everything is set up certain disk intensive programs do run noticably faster. But if you're going to be changing your (hah) file system frequently, the Finder will not do. Here were my impressions on the day I did all that folder building: From winkler Sat Oct 6 00:20:30 1984 To: info-mac-incoming Subject: tecmar Status: R Tecmar should be prosecuted for false advertising. People are going to go into computer stores and see the 10 Mb MacDrive working about 3 times as fast as a floppy and reporting 9000K free and they will conclude that they can both use the remaining space and continue to enjoy the increased speed, which would be a very attractive combination. Wrong. The fact is that as soon as you start to take advantage of the drive's capacity, Finder operations become intolerably slow. Intolerable means they take more than half an hour. Dropping a single file into a folder takes over 10 seconds. I made the mistake of choosing clean up earlier today. I waited more than half an hour for it and then left. I came back 7 hours later and it had finally finished. But then when I tried to move some files into a folder, it added insult to injury and crashed. The thing is rebooting now and I'll check back tomorrow to see if it is up. This is on a Fat Mac, by the way. I'm sure there would be additional problems on a little mac. The TecMar manual mentions that little macs frequently report "not enough memory to..." when working with their drive. I have about 200 files on the disk now, and although the Tecmar always allocates at least 20k per file (no matter how small the file!), there are still about 4 megabytes free. So you see that although the storage is liberally wasted, you'll still never be able to use all of it. It's only a little over half full now and already performance has plunged well below that of floppies (or card readers, for that matter). Perhaps if you only wanted to have a single 8 megabyte file, that would work better. But the finder is not up to managing a 10 meg drive in the usual way. Apple is promising a new finder and Tecmar is promising new software that will enable a cache that is currently unused in their drive. I think I'll save my money until then. Dan. --------------------------- That was the first day. We're happier now with the drive than we were then because after the initial struggle to set it up it has worked moderately well for a few things. But if you use any application that creates many files (like the Manx shell and editor), then the next time the finder starts up it uses an amazingly slow (seems like O(2^2^2^2^n)) algorithm to update its DeskTop file. (Actually, Manx provides a little utility which we haven't tried yet to help get around this.) Also, the MacDrive connects to the modem port and even when MacTerminal is set to go through the printer port it hasn't worked for us unless we turned of the hard drive. And start up time is slower because you need to boot from a floppy and then wait for the finder to get over the shock of finding so many files on one volume. If you're developing software and find yourself rebooting every time your program crashes, this again could be a problem. Remember that the Mac uses a flat file system. (Folders exist only in the Finder's imagination.) So every file on the 10 Mb drive must have a unique name (and you probably thought choosing meaningful variable names in a program was hard). And the Open File dialog box will sometimes show you over 100 file names to choose from. But don't worry, it won't get too much worse than that the because finder cannot handle many more files. We have about 180 files now and already there are severe performance problems for some operations and certain arrangements of those files in folders cause crashes. So we think that the Tecmar is a nice piece of hardware but that there are certain applications for which the current software (finder, flat file system) is quite inadequate.