Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!dadla!jrb
From: jrb@dadla.TEK.COM (Jim Binkley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: SH204 hard disk
Message-ID: <2697@dadla.TEK.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 88 00:17:39 GMT
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
Lines: 54


Moshe,

would you please inform as to what SUPEDIT is?  I was born under a
rock.

In reference to Atari hard disks in general, is there an equivalent of
"chkdsk"; i.e. a file system consistency checker, fixer-upper anywhere,
available for the average atari owner for rent or purchase?  Mr.
Harris, not having such a utility provided with your system is
unfathomable.

Also... I have an atari SH20? hard disk and am using the driver
supplied. Unfortunately for the sake of atari it sits next to a zenith
150-pc clone running good old msdos 2.2. Said ibm machine has a NEC
20meg drive and a 1010 winchester controller using the driver buried
away in the bios or somewhere. "To make a long story short, too late,
said the man in the audience...", My klunky old pc beats the atari's
performance on disk writes to pieces. This is curious.  The pc disk is
currently fragmented beyond belief with about %90 full; i.e., I won't
buy any reformat and try again explanations. Reading seems to be
comparable. I recently put together a little piece of code that was the
equivalent of the unix find utility and read all the directories on my
15 meg C: partition. That was fairly speedy. Writing is another matter.
Why?  Flicking the bit that turns off write-verify for "floppies"
doesn't seem to do any good on the hard disk. Did the supra driver that
Moshe used do any good on the atari disk?

One other observation:

As a rough benchmark: I have an interpreter that I run as a standard
time test on about an 8k "src" file. This program exists on both pc and
st. It should be compute bound as it really doesn't spend too much time
reading and writing to disk unlike say your average 4 pass C compiler:

on ibm-pc compiled with usoft v5.0 C

.30 seconds to compile (read compute write)

on pc with all file i/o via ram disk

.26 seconds to compile (read compute write)

on atari using SH20? drive and MWC v2.0 C compiler

.30 seconds to compile

on atari using ram disk

.15 seconds to compile

At least the 68000 computes faster...:->

			jim binkley jrb@amadeus.tek.com