High Density Disk Tip

[paw@bbs.ausom.oz.au (Peter Watson)]

This may be old news to some people, and it's pretty obvious with 20/20
hindsight - but it took me a long time to see.

I was wondering why Mac files I downloaded on my GS and transferred to a
HFS formatted High-Density disk took so long to copy (as in minutes for
a file of any size). Eventually I started thinking - and thought about
interleaving. I had purchased the disks already formatted (either for the
Mac, or for MSDOS in which case I simply "ERASED" the disk), and so I did
not check the interleaving. When I reformatted the disk to the more
sensible value of 2:1 (rather than the 1:1 it must have been), the copy
times dropped dramatically - even if still slow.

It wasn't immediately obvious as _reading_ was as fast as you would expect.
Writing was the bottleneck.

The bottom line - make sure your High Density disks are formatted at a 2:1
interleave - even if you have to reformat "pre-formatted" disks!
-- 
|| Peter A Watson ||     Telephone: (03) 894-1087   [+613] 894-1087    ||
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