Re: Old Apple2. where to start?

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article pubpc1@library.ucla.edu writes...

>The loss of DMA is not that big of a deal.  In real world,
>random read/write situations, it is not very noticeable (except when
>doing sequential operations like verifying a volume).

    No? My first hardrive setup was an Apple Rev C SCSI board
connected to an Apple 20SC HD, and to tell you the truth, it
wasn't much faster than my 3.5 floppy drive (I only kept it
for about a week or two it was so slow). Granted part of the
slowness was due to the hardrive mechnism (around 65 ms), the
controller being non-DMA just made everything _crawl_. I can
remember trying to load a large MOD file, it took several
minutes! Loading into GS/OS wasn't much fun either.

    It was such a pleasure when I got my RamFAST SCSI board and
connected it up to modern SCSI drive. Quite often I've found it
as fast as reading/writing to a RAM Disk! DMA makes a huge
difference, and I wouldn't dream of using anything less.

>I used to think 170MB was enough too, but soon my hard disk filled
>up.  As for the HFS partitions, if you keep them at 96MB or below,
>they work well.  I've not had any trouble with them.  5 HFS 95MB
>partitions and a few ProDOS partitions don't seem too much.

    Overflow an HFS partition so you get a "Volume Full" error and
see what happens. ;) The real problem with HFS isn't just the bugs
or slow speed, but that fact that there are no HFS utilities for the
IIgs. Unless you have a Mac handy to connect your hardrive up to,
your treading on very thin ice using HFS.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca