🚀 go-pugleaf

berger@atropa (Mike Berger) writes:

>rhunt@med.unc.edu (Rick Hunt) writes:
>>I am looking for a program that was very useful long ago when I had an
>>Atari ST.  It was used to format floppy disks with a offset sector format
>>that sped up disk access by about 75%.  Since the ST used the same kind of
>>disk format as the PC, I thought there might be a program floating around
>>that would do this for the PC, but I haven't seen one.  Anyone have any
>>pointers?
>*----
>The shareware "diskrw" program appears to do this.  You run a blank
>disk of any format that interests you first so it can establish the
>best interleave for your machine.

Yes and no.

Yes, the high speed of DiskRW compared to other programs for the
same purpose comes (partly) from using this trick.

No, DiskRW is not a formatting program, is a program to copy disks,
to store all contents of a disk in an image file and to write such
files back to disks.

It can also format the destination disk, but this format will be 
a standard format. I find it better to have disks formatted in the
usual way and have intelligent programs to access them faster.
DiskRW is a fast way to copy disks, a fast file copier will come soon.

>Of course, the format you use might be faster on your own machine,
>but much slower on others, so you might not have much of an
>advantage if you primarily make floppy disks for use elsewhere.

That's why DiskRW has to be initialized on every machine.

By the way: on MS-DOS the speedup is more like 25-50%, I never
observed 75%.

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Klaus Hartnegg, Kleist-Str. 7, D-7835 Teningen, Germany | This text reflects   
Internet : hartnegg@ibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de             | MY opinion, not that
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