braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (braner) (01/23/88)
[] As for SH204 writing slowness: that has nothing to do with the HW nor the driver. It is a GEMDOG 'feature'. Notice when you write a file to floppy how the head travels back and forth between the data track, the (sub)directory and the 2 FATs at least TWICE? GEMDOS is wasteful in such, and when the data gets far from the FATs writing many small files gets very slow, even on the HD. No solution besides rewriting GEMDOS. (When _reading_, with my own caching program holding the directory and FAT, it is very fast.) - Moshe Braner PS: The ST desktop program is even worse than GEMDOS itself. To wit: - when copying a small file from one disk to another in the same drive, it copies into RAM just a few bytes (directory information, I think), asks to swap disks, swap again, reads the file, swap again, writes. (Why not copy all that's needed into RAM the first time around?) - when copying a large file into a disk where there isn't enough space, it first writes all that fits, then deletes it and says "no room". (Why not check first to see if there's enough room?) - when deleting a bunch of files in one operation, it goes back and forth between the (sub)directory and FATs once for each file. In the time it takes to delete one file clunky old MS-DOS can delete 40 files. (Why not read the FAT into RAM _once_, do all the processing, write out?) - no way to move a file from one directory to another without copying it, then deleting the original. (Micro-C-Shell does it the sane (not same) way.)