larry@focsys.UUCP (Larry Williamson) (07/27/88)
The poor performance of the Bell Technologies floppy driver can be somewhat
overcome if one formats the floppies with an interleave of 2 rather than
the default 4.
I ran a couple of very simple tests with interleaves of 4, 3, 2 and 1. I
would format the floppy, and then
find tmp-dir -print | cpio -ovc >/dev/rdsk/f0q15dt
where tmp-dir contained 10 files totaling about 327K
The timex results were:
interleave time
4 50.77
3 43.02
2 36.14
1 1:55.19
Caveat: This test was definitely non-exhaustive. But it did indicate a
definite trend. I only tested write times and this with cpio. Read
times, tar and mounted file systems will possibly be different. You
might like to do some test of your own.
I'm sure that the type of floppy controller will affect your results somewhat.
The system that I'm using is a 16Mhz Intel motherboard with a Western Digital
RA2 controller
Larryrick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) (07/29/88)
In article <158@hocus.focsys.UUCP> larry@focsys.UUCP (Larry Williamson) writes: > >The poor performance of the Bell Technologies floppy driver can be somewhat >overcome if one formats the floppies with an interleave of 2 rather than >the default 4. > It is just plain sloppy that both Interactive Systems and Bell Tech seem to feel that an interleave of 2 or 4 is an acceptable way to mask A POORLY TUNED FLOPPY DRIVER. This approach means that you cannot get the maximum performance out of your floppy drive. It means that you screw yourself if you try to use previously formatted 1:1 disks (such as from MS-DOS). FOLKS, there is no reason why the FLOPPY DRIVER cannot be written to handle 1:1 interleave. I've written a floppy driver that can do it. It is a simple matter of tuning the damn code. Don't accept inferior performance. Demand 1:1 interleave from your vendor. -- Rick Richardson, PC Research, Inc. (201) 542-3734 (voice, nights) OR (201) 389-8963 (voice, days) uunet!pcrat!rick (UUCP) rick%pcrat.uucp@uunet.uu.net (INTERNET)