Unix floppy disk formats (was: Backups of Distibution Floppies)

Mark Levy mhlevy at sbee.sunysb.edu
Wed May 31 15:27:56 AEST 1989


> 
> And now a question: why is it that floppy operations are so
> incredibly slow under unix.  SCO and AT&T are both bad about
> this.  Do something on the floppy drive and you may as else go
> to lunch while it's chugging along.  A 3b2 (older models, at
> least) takes about two minutes to read or write one 80-track
> floppy!!!  That's about 1.5 seconds a track.  It's academic, of
> course... I haven't used the floppy as the swap device in some
> time now... 

If you read the manual, you will find that in the later versions of SCO
XENIX, you can specify the interleave.  A 1:1 interleave speeds things up
tremendously, if you controller can handle it.

Sorry, but I'm not sure when that feature was implemented, and I don't have
my manual handy right now to give you the switch setting.

Mark

-- 
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Mark Levy { mhlevy at sbccvm.BITNET   } 	% Debbie Gibson is pregnant,  with
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          { mhlevy at ccvm.sunysb.edu } 	%                         Mojo Nixon



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