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

[Mark Levy]

> 
> 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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