On 6/7/2011 5:00, Invisible wrote:
> 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.

It's a removable disk.

There were backup programs under DOS that worked this way, incidentally. 
You'd just page floppies and it would write them as fast as it could, even 
alternating drives. But when it was done, they were all valid files.

> (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...)

Why would you optimize something as slow as floppy access instead of 
improving other parts of the system to start with?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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