On 07/06/2011 12:34 PM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Question: How long does it take to copy 1.0 MB of data onto a 3" floppy
>> disk?
>
>    Don't you mean a 3.5-inch floppy disk?

I can never remember whether it's 3.5 or 3.25 inch.

>> I don't know
>> whether the issue is with the file system design or just the OS
>> implementation, but it appears that every file creation operation
>> involves writing the file's data to one block, and updating the file
>> listing in another block.

>    That's how FAT works.

Probably.

Still, why it can't build an image of what the final disk layout will 
look like in RAM and then write it all to disk in the most efficient 
order, I don't know. That's how I would probably do it.

(I guess Windows NT doesn't do this because when that was new, 64 MB RAM 
was considered "large". So using over 1.5% of it for the disk image was 
probably unacceptable. Why Windows XP still has this limitation is 
another matter...)

In the end, the resolution was to create a self-extracting archive of 
all the tiny files using 7zip. Remarkably, the resulting self-extracting 
file /actually works/ on Windows NT still. (As a happy side-effect, the 
1MB of data becomes 202KB.)

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