cw@varian.UUCP (Carl Weidling) (07/02/87)
I was able to decode dcformat. I have only used it to format st disks so I can't speak for all of its abilities. However, I ran some experiments to compare it to the 'twister' program from START magazine, and the standard format. I had a file that was 237,011 bytes long. I put this in a RAM disk and copied it to freshly formatted disks of each type of formatting program, I also copied these back into the RAM disk. The results (times are no better than 1/2 second resolution despite the number of digits) RAM to DCFORMAT disk - 41.88 seconds RAM to TWISTED disk - 42.20 seconds RAM to STANDARD disk - 53.8 seconds DCFORMAT to RAM - 17.57 seconds TWISTED to RAM - 17.47 seconds STANDARD to RAM - 26.9 seconds That's not all, I got 726016 bytes available on the standard format disk, 807936 on the TWISTER formatted disk, and 828416 on the DCFORMATTED disk. One final note. I wrote a program that listed all the files in all the directories on a disk, it also would list files arc'd in any files with a .ARC extension (I sent this to sources and binaries but saw nothing since, if people are interested I can post to the net), if I used this on a TWISTER formatted disk that had not had anything deleted since being formatted, it was OK, if I used it on a TWISTER formatted disk right after rebooting, it was OK, otherwise, the program got very confused. This does not seem to be the case with standard formatted disks or with DCFORMATTed disks. Way to go. Regards, Carl Weidling