Bootable Floppy from CD?

From: Eric J. Korpela <korpela_at_albert.ssl.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu May 25 11:00:12 2000

> I use pcdos 6.3 and 7.0. much better than msdos i think, and i prefer the
> editor. how in the world can one realise 15% performance increase running
> disk compression? logic would indicate a degradation since you are running an
> extra task to compress the hard drive not to mention less memory space in the
> UMBs to load the compression driver high. i do not use any sort of disk
> compression and never recommend it to anyone. i supported end users, and
> there were too many times when users compressed their hard drives, and ended
> up hosing them. only option to them was fdisk and reinstall. K.I.S.S.

As usual, with disk compression YMMV. It depends upon where the bottleneck
is. The first system I used compressed volumes on (a long time back) had
an XT bus running at half the processor speed that was lucky to get 250 kBps
from the HD drives. It was so slow that the best interleave was 1 because
it took an entire rotation to transfer one sector from the controller to
memory. Compression besically doubled the I/O speed. A good (not smartdrive)
write cache (with write delay set to the max) worked wonders as well.

Even on my 386 machine compression turned out to be a performance boost in
DOS and Windows. In the end, I don't think I lost any data to failure of a
compressed drive. Stacker was pretty robust.

Eric
Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 11:00:12 BST