Week of September 1st, 1995 (950901)
People asked about Ami-File-Safe, and I got it. Here is the information
on the product, and here are the prices.
I am now taking ORDERs for it until Friday, September 8th, at which time
I will place a bulk order with Fourth Level Developments in the UK.
Ami-File-Safe User..................................................$59.95
Ami-File-Safe Pro..................................................$119.95
Pricing in Canadian dollars.
Any applicable shipping and taxes must be added.
As usual, I will ship anywhere in the world.
PS: I have some extra SuperBuster -11's. They are priced at $99 each.
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A M I - F I L E - S A F E I N F O R M A T I O N
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Amiga Filing Systems
--------------------
The standard AmigaDos filesystem (OFS) has always had problems. There are
two primary difficulties:
(i). It is slow (on large disks very slow!).
(ii) The filing system has problems if the system crashes whilst writing
to disk.
Commodore tried to improve the performance of their filesystem a number of
times. Workbench 2.0 added the Fast File System (FFS), and now, with
Workbench 3.1, we have the Fast File System with directory caching
(FFS-DC). This makes directory scan faster, but writing to disk and
directory operations, like delete and rename, are slower than ever.
The New de facto standard
-------------------------
These problems have been addressed by Ami-FileSafe along with a large
number of other inefficiencies to produce a new de facto standard filing
system for your Amiga.
The improvements over FFS in both speed and data security are substantial.
Ami-FileSafe (AFS) was originally developed by Michiel Pelt and released as
shareware under the name PFS (Professional File System). The need for a
more sophisticated and comprehensive version soon became apparent and this
led to collaboration between Michiel Pelt and Fourth Level Developments,
who are renowned for their work on Computer filing systems and on
magneto-optical drives with very large directory trees. Ami-FileSafe
Version 2.1 is the result of that collaboration.
There were a number of bugs present in the shareware version which has now
been withdrawn from circulation. Fourth Level Developments and Michiel
Pelt worked together to identify and eradicate all known bugs and to
introduce new features. This resulted in Ami-FileSafe Version 1.0 which
was subjected to exhaustive beta testing. This created a stable platform
for further development to commercial standards.
Fourth Level Developments have a policy of not shipping software until it
has fully matured. Ami-Filesafe V1.0 was therefore not released. However
the decision was taken to add a significant number of features which would
make AFS operate reliably in all environments and provide a filing system
capable of being accepted as the new de facto standard for the amiga. The
result is AFS V2.1
Ami-FileSafe V2.1 Pro - Basic Features
--------------------------------------
AFS V2.1 Pro includes:
Notification
Hard and soft links
Support for large disk drives (Upto 4GB)
Auto-Booting
Add Buffers
Sophisticated Cache Routines
Max transfer and DMA masking
Very Large Directory Support
Setowner
A New FreeBlock Management System
International Support
MultiUser FileSystem Support
On the fly AFS to FFS conversion.
Hundreds of minor fixes and improvements have been made which amount to a
major rewrite of the filing system.
Ami-FileSafe V2.1 User
----------------------
Ami-FileSafe User is a budget version of AFS and has the follow limitations:-
- It may only be used on ONE HARD DRIVE of upto 650MB.
- It does not include the MultiUser FileSystem version of AFS.
It does however include the FFS to AFS converter.
Disksalv support
----------------
Ami-FileSafe is supported in Dave Haynie`s latest version of DiskSalv
(release date July/Aug 1995) which will be distributed by
Fourth Level Developments.
Floppy/Harddisk
---------------
Included are a version for floppy and a version for harddisk. It is up to
you to use one of them or both. They don't interfere with each other and
can be used simultaneously on the same machine.
Future Releases and UpDates
---------------------------
Version 2.2 will include comprehensive file undelete features (release date
August 1995) and support for partitions up to 9G.
Registered users of 2.1 will be entitled to this upgrade free of
charge.
Version 3.00, due in the Autumn of 1995, will provide a significant number
of additional features including memory protection for both the filing
system cache and for programmes written to take advantage of AFS. This
will fulfill the long expressed requirements of serious amiga users.
The plans for Version 4.00 include multi-platform and operating system
support, together with variable read/write access modes to enable
developers select the mode which best supports the requirements of their
application. Detailed information for developers is due for release in
August/September 1995.
Performance
-----------
Ami-FileSafe has the following performance characteristics:
High performance:
read and write operations: faster by a factor of 2
directoryscan: 10-20 times FFS, 3 times FFS-DC
delete/rename/protect etc: 10-20 times faster
Other features:
full AmigaDos compatibility
better fault tolerance
parallel access almost without performance loss
disks NEVER get invalidated
This distribution includes a floppy version and a harddisk version. The
floppy version is fully compatible with the previous shareware versions of
PFS. It can be used for both double and high density disks.
The harddisk version supports all hard disks of all brands and sizes. It
is RDB installable and supports booting. It is NOT compatible with
harddisk shareware versions of PFS.
Benchmarks
----------
Test FFS AFS Units
DirScan 409 1780 Files/Second
Create 227 1073 K/Second
Read 244 1363 K/Second
The DirScan, Create and Read tests were done with DiskSpeed V4.2
SeekTest (x100) 53.6 4.4 Seconds
SeekTest was done using a custom program (Source code available on request).
It performs the following sequence:
Seek Start of file
Write 4 Bytes
Seek to End of file
Write 4 Bytes
Repeat
Reviews
-------
A review of Ami-FileSafe is available from Aminet and comp.sys.amiga.reviews.
If you would like this review send to you then please ask.
System Requirements
-------------------
Ami-FileSafe will work on any Amiga with kickstart 2.04 or higher.
Versions for both 68000 and 68020+ based systems are provided.
Support
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A new mailing list has been setup for AFS users and is quite busy.
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