[Coco] Preserving old CoCo diskettes...

[Roger Taylor]

At 09:54 PM 5/18/2010, you wrote:
> > From: "Roger Taylor" <operator at coco3.com>
> > 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.
>
>
>Roger, speed is a very big deal. It seems all our I/O today should 
>be faster than the CoCo could keep up with. If modern 
>implementations can't be as fast as what I was running when I was 
>last using the CoCo full time fifteen years ago, I'm not sure what 
>to make of that.
>
>For more "real" benchmarks, I guess showing format time and backup 
>time might be decent. I know I will be backing up hundreds of floppy 
>disks to your SD device (and/or across DW serial link). Speed will 
>certainly matter for me ;-)


True, let's just benchmark every product across the board starting 
with the case they're made with and how many historic CoCo paks were 
butchered to aquire those cases, etc.  Then we can work our way up to 
hanging around in DOS for a while running much faster code, if the 
other paks actually work in DOS, that is.

The fact is, the Drive Pak is an extremely cool gadget that does the 
most in the smallest space with the most memory of any other pak I 
know of, and for this reason I think it is the best storage solution 
for the CoCo, yet.  Part of this is because of the awesome CoCoNet ROM.

Now, the MicroSD module has it's own command and packet response time 
which is also based on the speed of the memory cards in use, etc.

Still, the Drive Pak runs much faster than a floppy system, but if I 
decide to make it run twice as fast in DOS starting tomorrow, a new 
ROM can be shipped to each customer.  Done.

-- 
~ Roger Taylor