#New Filesystem
I uploaded a file called: "ffs31.lha" and here is what the docs say:
"This new Fastfilesystem and HDToolbox are pre-releases of Workbench 3.1 from
Commodore. There are a few applications, such as the new Studio 16 digital
audio editing system that need _really_, _really_ fast file transfers, so even
though Commodore isn't ready to release Workbench 3.1, they agreed to allow
these files to be distributed.
Be advised that you have to re-format your drives to take advantage of the
extra speed. Be further advised that using the higher block sizes, while
providing blinding speed increases, can use up a lot of hard drive space. My
own personal compromise was to set the block size to 2048, which doubled the
speed of my A4000 IDE drive, but took up just under 10% of the available
storage space on the drive.
Basically, besides a new L:Fastfilesystem device driver file, there's a new
HDToolbox program to format the drive with. This new HDToolbox allows reading
and writing block sizes other than the usual 512 bytes per block. It allows you
to set up to 32K block sizes! This is like having built-in drive cacheing. With
a 16K block size, my lowly Seagate IDE drive turned over 3 megabytes per second
transfers, using DPerf2 as a benchmark. Prior to this, transfers were around
600K or so, according to DPerf2. Also note that the fastest transfers occur
with "International Mode" and "Directory Cacheing" turned OFF.
There's a price for this, though! Since the smallest amount of data that can be
written to your hard disk is one disk block, the size of your disk blocks will
regulate the smallest file you can save. For example, right now, the smallest
file you can have is 512 bytes. Well, the file can be smaller, let's say 200
bytes, but it will take up 512 bytes of space on the hard disk, since that's
the block size. If you change your block size to 16K, that same 200 byte file
will now take 16,384 bytes of space, even though the file is only 200 bytes! So
a very large block size will result in blinding hard drive speeds, but if you
have a lot of small files, waste a great deal of hard drive space. On a
graphics partition with 24-bit files, you have a lot of big files there, a big
block size would probably work OK. But on a more standard partition, such as
your boot partition, there's a lot of smaller files, so a large block size
could waste a lot of your space.
In my own test, a block size of 2048 doubled the speed of my A4000's IDE drive,
but only wasted a little under 10% of the storage space. It was a trade I was
more than willing to make. Your mileage may vary….
Best thing to do is to make a small partition, say around 10MB or so, test the
speed with a benchmark program, then copy a known amount of files to it to
check the storage efficiency. If 3MB of files leave a 10MB partition 50% full,
you've lost 20%…"
What do you think? Is it worth reformatting the drive? The HDToolbox program is
different and has more options, plus the new fastfile is included.