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From: colas@lemur.inria.fr (Colas Nahaboo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Slow workbench disk problem
Message-ID: <1990Dec21.161354@lemur.inria.fr>
Date: 21 Dec 90 15:13:54 GMT
References: <1749@winnie.fit.edu>
Sender: news@mirsa.inria.fr
Reply-To: colas@lemur.inria.fr (Colas Nahaboo)
Organization: Koala Project, Bull Research France
Lines: 41
Nntp-Posting-Host: lemur.inria.fr

The solution is to use a disk reorganizer program. As a new amiga user, I just
went through this phase of having a full-featured workbench disk (~ 180 files
now), and it booted in 3mns, now it boots in 1mn! I tried many disk reorganizer
programs, and here are the result of my experiments:

WARNING: these tests are for floppies only. I didn't try these programs on Hard
disks, where they may perform better or worse!

Best one:
FastDisk 1.5 (fish disk 286). WARNING: Do not use FastDiskII, it only produced
corrupted disks on the 3 disks I tried. FastDisk 1.5 never gave me any problem.

Second Best one: 
BAD (Blitz-A-Disk) a commercial program I tried, seems VERY robust and safe,
handles FFS and hard disk, but yielded a disk booting in 1'26", whereas fastdisk
1.5 gived 1'09". It is the fastest to process disks, though.

Good:
Disk-It. Commercial. Nice real-time map of what it does, same speeds as BAD
(only handles floppies). never corrupted my disks. BUT: does not multitask.

AVOID:
Disk mechanic: awfully slow, trashed my disks. (Commercial). A real sh*t.
Disk Arranger 1.2: detected link errors on sane (as far as disksalv, fixdisk,
     discdoctor.. etc could tell) disks. Thus couldn't try it.
QuarterBack tools 1.2: perfect joke: trashes disks. (Commercial)
FastDiskII: Don't know why but trashed my disks (they would boot, but will
     make random guru after some minutes) Suspect its use of Arp as source of   
problems... Anybody knows the solution?

So, grab fish disk #286, or buy BAD (FastDisk only handles floppies, BAD is more
versatile)

Now, if somebody could post the same kind of reviews for disk (preferably
floppy) caches, I would be VERY grateful. I tried FaccII, but it didn't impress
me... But more of it in another post.

--
Colas Nahaboo, Bull Research France -- Koala Project -- GWM X11 Window Manager
Internet: colas@mirsa.inria.fr, Phone: (33) 93.65.77.70, Fax: (33) 93 65 77 66
INRIA Sophia, 2004, rte des Lucioles, B.P.109 - 06561 Valbonne Cedex, FRANCE