🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep12.175249.11648@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>, gwni@troi.cc.rochester.edu (G. Wayne Nichols) writes:
> In <Jim_Johnson.08ju@abcd.Houghton.MI.US> Jim_Johnson@abcd.Houghton.MI.US (Jim Johnson) writes:
> 
> >Until I recently purchased a much larger HD, I ran the version of SuperStor
> >included with DRDOS 6.0.  In fact, I was running it on a 20meg parallel
> >port connected HD.  It ran just fine.  DRDOS 6.0 documentation does warn
> >you against using any disk optimization software other than DISKOPT (comes
> >with DRDOS 6.0) on the SuperStor partition.  I personnally like Norton, but
> >it was a small price for what I gained in disk space.
> 
> While totally ignoring such warnings, I have successfully used
> PC Tools' COMPRESS utility on a SuperStor'ed drive many times.
> I imagine Norton's SPEEDISK would be equally successful.

If there are enough free space on the disk, such utilities could work fine, 
but when there's little free space, and the average compression ratio is
(much?) less than 2.0, there may be problems. That is because these programs
usually reads the FAT directly to get the amount of free diskspace. On a
SuperStor'ed disk the FAT is of a constant size capable of storing a compression
ratio 2.0 (i.e it's always twice as big, regardless of compression ratio).
The size of the actual data area is not constant, i.e. dependant of the data it
may fit twice as much or less. Therefore these optimization programs may read
more free clusters than there actually is, and may cause some problems with the
disk (I got so called 'Superstor reserved units').

So take care when the disk is close to filled up.

And besides all that DISKOPT do (I think) is just move all used clusters to the
beginning of the superstor'ed disk.

(The above information is based on what I've discovered myself and some guesses
and may not be 100% accurate, but it's fairly how it works).

                        --------------------------
Hans Petter Egge                            |  I'm so busy wasting time,
HSR,                                        |  that I've got no time to waste
Stavanger, Norway