[Coco] Preserving old CoCo diskettes...

[Boisy G. Pitre]

On May 18, 2010, at 7:49 PM, Roger Taylor wrote:

> At 07:25 PM 5/18/2010, you wrote:
>> At 04:28 PM 5/18/2010, you wrote:
>>> Gene,
>>> 
>>> /X0 is stock DW, open source. Take a peek.
>>> 
>>> As far as being slow...
>>> 
>>> Provide some benchmarks from your system. The proof is in the pudding...results are where the facts are.
>>> 
>>> I know what the numbers are and will be. Then you will rethink your statement a bit. :)
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> Mark
>> 
>> 
>> Actually, he won't, Mark.  And I'll tell you why.  You're trying to compare the best storage solution around for the CoCo with things that aren't.    ;)

Roger,

I won't say it's a bad solution, but I take issue that it is the best.  It's ok to be proud of something, but when you say it is the best, you should be ready to back that opinion up with quantifiable data.

>> And we've all seen diesel trucks win the race in the long haul.  But this isn't a race or competition.  I've got a different solution here and I'd appreciate it if people didn't compare it to other "things" that don't do the same thing.
>> 
>> The CoCoNet ROM is a smart ROM and I've paid the price to make it work on every CoCo and all devices with no configuration requirements, and I also take pride in the mini paks that use the CoCoNet ROM.

As well you should.  Darren Atkinson did a great job designing the hardware, and you've done a nice job marketing it.

> I forgot to mention, on this firmware benchmark thing: the early OS-9 drivers for the Drive Pak read card-LSN0 on each sector transfer, so there was 1024 card bytes read for every 256 CoCo bytes requested.   Today's driver cuts that in half.  Tomorrow's driver will cut that in half when I move to the deblocking scheme.  If I can get the megaread (not really a good tool) down to 1:09 or so, I'm happy with this, but I won't trade a single bit of quality or stability just to meet somebody else's expectations of what a false benchmark should show.

Megaread doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it has been a standard for measuring throughput on the CoCo under OS-9 for near two decades.  

As someone who sells CoCo hardware, you should expect it to be benchmarked and tested for performance.  This is not an attempt to knock your product; it merely states what its performance is relative to other devices.  The current megaread time for your pak with an SD card is around 254 seconds or so.  It sounds like you've identified the issues that are causing less than ideal performance, so it would be great to see how subsequent generations of your driver stack up.

As for deblocking, SuperDriver handles this very well and has a myriad of other features.  You could save yourself a lot of time and write a low level driver that plugs right into SuperDriver.  The documentation is online at www.cloud9tech.com and the product comes with a sample low level driver that you can start with.  All you need to do is write the low level routines to talk to your device and hand back the data according to the documented specifications.  You get partitioning, deblocking, write verification, automatic drive size querying, and smart caching all for free.
--
Boisy G. Pitre
http://www.tee-boy.com/