Re: Unnecessary seeks on mounted floppies?

Martin Buck (Martin-2.Buck@student.uni-ulm.de)
Tue, 16 Apr 96 15:04 MET DST

> 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.

I don't think that this changed very much between 1.2 and 1.3.x, because the
access to mounted floppies was always slow since 0.99.x (which is why I used
mtools most time).

Martin

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