perley@galaxy (Donald P Perley) (11/08/90)
In article <13967@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>, cleland@sdbio2 (Thomas Cleland) writes: >Progressive Peripherals' 68040DC card for the Amiga 3000 lists >in the $1200 range >includes circuitry for real time peripheral-storage data >compression, transparent to the user and without slowdown. >Floppies, hard disks, Syquests, optical disks, whatever--all are >compressed to store 3 to 10 times their stated capacity. This >can of course be turned off I have used computers with hardware compression for disk files (Wang VS). It helps a lot. BUT.. if they can do random seeks on the compressed files without slowdown, it will be a neat trick. -don perley perley@trub.crd.ge.com
cleland@sdbio2.ucsd.edu (Thomas Cleland) (11/10/90)
>I have used computers with hardware compression for disk files >(Wang VS). It helps a lot. BUT.. if they can do random seeks on the >compressed files without slowdown, it will be a neat trick. > (referring to Progressive P&S's 68040DC card for the A3000) That was a puzzler for me too, but the PPS man was firm in his resolve. My best guess is that the speed of reading off the disk is enhanced to a greater extent than the seek speed through an enlarged directory is slowed.