Low level formatting - [was Re: slow (s-l-o-w) install (TRY)]

[Frank Cox]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:54:48 -0500
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:

> The main reason indeed, by going to a different interleave matched to 
> your usage you could get a big jump in performance (or make it dog 
> slow). And by playing with large sector sizes you could get a large jump 
> in capacity. Just as a 3-1/2 floppy can jump from 1440k to 1920k with 
> large sectors, some hard drives could get a similar boost in capacity, 
> up to 40%.

I used to have (probably still have, somewhere) a DOS program that would test
your drive access speeds and optimize the interleave for maximum speed.  It
worked really well.

On the subject of capacity, the value of larger (or smaller) sector sizes
depends on the data being stored on it.  I used to have a .sys device driver
that created a "virtual drive" from a file on your disk with a very small
sector size.  I used that to store Fidonet .MSG files (which tended to be small)
and got a big boost in my capacity due to less wasted space.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com