Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!dcl-cs!bath63!pes From: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: StepRate ... a utility that makes your floppies FASTER! Message-ID: <1718@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 8-Oct-87 05:41:19 EDT Article-I.D.: bath63.1718 Posted: Thu Oct 8 05:41:19 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 20:07:46 EDT References: <15607@amdahl.amdahl.com> Reply-To: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee) Organization: AUCC c/o University of Bath Lines: 16 Keywords: stepping rate improvement speedup faster floppy There is a (defacto, I think) standard for flopsies which says that 3.5 inch drives must step at 3ms/step, and 5.25 at 6ms/step. If your drive will not do this, you've got a valid complaint. *Most* but not all drives will operate satisfactorily at higher step rates, without problem. (This is nothing to do with CBM, but rather with the companies that make the flopsy drive 'engines'. If your personal drive will handle a higher step rate (lower time) then you're OK. If it can't, one likely result is data corruption which you won't notice when you write a file, but which will garbage it so you can't get it back. I usually run a higher step rate on my machine, but I'd recommend (a) that you test it on non-critical disks for a few hours first, and (b) that you reset it to the 'normal' value before doing anything critical, like making your backups. It's great for non-critical things, though, such as 'temp files' for various applications which need them.