[net.micro.amiga] date command and second drive

rokicki@Navajo.ARPA (Tomas Rokicki) (03/26/86)

[ burp ]

This surprised a few of my Amiga friends, so maybe it's useful.  The date
command with a ? argument will prompt from the window for the date; this
is useful in startup-sequence.

Also, does anyone have any idea why a second drive requires about 30K?  Do
they load another driver, or what?  Thanks!

-tom

farren@well.UUCP (Mike Farren) (03/29/86)

In article <462@Navajo.ARPA> rokicki@Navajo.ARPA (Tomas Rokicki) writes:
>
>Also, does anyone have any idea why a second drive requires about 30K?  Do
>they load another driver, or what?  Thanks!

    Each drive requires a buffer which is as long as an entire track's worth
of bits in their encoded form, with one clock bit and one data bit for each
"actual" bit of data.  With 11 sectors per track, two heads, and 528 bytes 
per sector, that adds up to about 24K.  Add a little more to allow for slop,
and you get to 30K pretty quickly.  This isn't exactly the most ELEGANT way
of doing a disk driver, but it does allow such goodies as reading most of
the different 3-1/2" disk formats out there...


-- 
           Mike Farren
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