Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!peter
From: peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Semicoherent flame about Amigados.
Message-ID: <659@nuchat.UUCP>
Date: 18 Feb 88 00:27:15 GMT
References: <8802110359.AA02000@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx
Lines: 32

In article ... dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
> >Please, after you finish the fast file system... get a reliable on. It doesn't
> >have to be big: 720K per diskette would be fine. But it needs to have real
> >sectors to act as firewalls when corruption occurs (as it invariably does).

> 	Silly, they *are* real sectors... they simply do not have the
> *space* normally put between sectors.  The problem is with the way AmigaDOS
> and the trackdisk.device handle it. 

They don't work like real sectors. There's no reason they need to be real
sectors... they're just logical divisions on a track. They might have
sector headers and be encoded in MFM, but there's really no reson for it
given how they're used.

> 	One major improvment, and one reason why IBM-PC harddisks/floppies
> 	Another reason PC disk drivers seem more reliable is the inherent
> single tasking nature of the PC.. it usually doesn't freeze in the middle of
> a disk operation.

The main reason is that a bad sector doesn't corrupt the rest of the sectors
on the track. A bad spot has about an 11% (1/9) chance of hitting a given
sector on the PC, but a 100% chance on the Amiga... because they're not
really sectors.

UNIX is multitasking and has a much greater reliability track record than
AmigaDOS (or PC-DOS), so you're just wasting your time making that the
scapegoat. UNIX uses real sectors, and UNIX checks for and recovers from
disk errors.
-- 
-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva  `-_-'
-- normally  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter                U
-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.