[Coco] Using that 16/32/64 MB RamDrive.

[Theodore Evans (Alex)]

On Feb 5, 2004, at 6:42 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Thursday 05 February 2004 23:28, Paul T. Barton wrote:
>> Mark,
>>
>> Gee, I don't know. I'll try and dsave
>> my biggest partition to /r0 and see.
>>
>> Formatting is really a pain. For now
>> I have 15.9MB and formatting counts
>> from $000 to $3DF. iIt takes about
>> 3-4 minutes. The actual dsave-copy is
>> pretty fast.
>>
>> I wish that I had another version of FORMAT
>> just for this ramdrive that wouldn't print
>> the sector #'s and "run faster".
>>
> Can you set it for logical only, with no verify?  Unless its
> verifying, which is where the sectors get counted up, a logical
> format should only take a few milliseconds.  It only has to compose
> and write 3 sectors to do that, LSN0 for the usual reasons, LSN1 for
> the fat, and LSN2 for the first sector of the root directory.
> Everything else gets written as needed anyway.

A 16 MB drive would have 64k 256 byte sectors which would require an 
allocation map (it isn't a FAT as is only indicates which sectors are 
allocated, not how they are structured as files like the chains in 
MS-DOS/Windows)  of 8k bytes or 32 sectors, so even a logical format of 
a drive this size would require writing 34 sectors.  Still mighty fast. 
  Even a drive as small as a 720k floppy requires more than a single 
sector for the allocation map.