Messages in this thread | | | From | "Ulrich Windl" <> | Date | Wed, 17 Apr 1996 09:57:12 +0100 | Subject | Re: Unnecessary seeks on mounted floppies? |
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On 16 Apr 96 at 15:04, Martin Buck wrote:
> > chunks than 1.3>=59 does. This isn't perfect, but even better. I've > > noticed slow floppy access on minix filesystems, too (a lot of > > seeking). As already stated some time ago, MS-Smartdrive now reads > > complete tracks on the floppy; why not Linux? (The floppy controller > > has a read-track command, BTW) > > The problem isn't read-ahead of the data in the file. The problem is that > there is absolutely no read-ahead of the FAT. Only the one sector of the FAT > that is currently needed will be read.
But if you read the first track you have all the FAT in memory; you shouldn't need to go back to that track too soon. The problem seems that there are much more seeks when accessing a floppy than there are physical cylinders. This is true even with plenty (32MB) of buffer/cache RAM.
Ulrich
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