[Coco] high density floppy controller mods
jdaggett at gate.net
jdaggett at gate.net
Fri Aug 4 22:37:37 EDT 2006
On 4 Aug 2006 at 11:33, Warren Hoslet wrote:
> The extra gaps required for the additional 18 sectors may make things
> pretty tight. Isn't that why PC disks went to 512 bytes per sector (to
> double the data bytes per-track without increasing the sector count)?
**************
All floppy contrrollers allow 128, 256, 512 and 1024 byte per sector. FAT12 is limited in its
directory size. If you put enough small files on even a 3.5 in HD floppy, you can fill the
directory tract before the data from the files fills the rest of the tracts. If my memory serves
me correctly it had something to do with FAT12, if you keep the sectors per cluster the
same, then you have more clusters per disk. This can create a condition where the sector
usage becomes less efficient when storing large numbers of small files. The work around
that was to increase the sector size and keep the same sectors per cluster.
Going beyond 1.44 MB on a floppy is pushing the limits of the FAT12 directory structure.
I would believes that as hard drives start to push closer to 1TB, FAT32 will likely become
inadequate. Cluster sizes will have to grow to a point that there will become a sizable
percentage of wasted space on a formatted disk.
james
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