In a message of 27 Mar 96 Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>> DC>> On a PC, the dir listings and updates are so much faster it isn't
>> even DC>> funny. One has to wonder what the Amiga's doing that takes it
>> so long DC>> with a few dozen (hundred is even slower) listings in a
>> directory...
>> >Sometimes the ASL-Requester is extremely slow -- I suppose this depends
>> >on heavy disk fragmentation.
>> >But without any doubts WB needs some enhancement in this category!
DLB> As for another slowdown, consider the different structures in
DLB> the file system. The Amiga directory blocks do not store file names.
DLB> To do a directory, the Amiga has to follow every pointer (and chained
DLB> pointers) in a directory block to find the actual file header block
DLB> that contains the name string.
DLB> I don't know the MS-DOS system that well; I /think/ the
DLB> directory actually stores the file names.
Well, on DOS, the directory's hold the filename, and a pointer to the start of the file.
But, we can be glad we don't have that file system FAT, because instead of each block pointing to the next block, there is a structure called FAT in the beginning (and a copy in the end) of the disk.
That structure contains one entry per 'block', and that entry can be eitehr 16 or 12 bit (yes, uses 2 or one and a half byte each), and the FAT structure holds all info about how ALL files in the WHOLE disk is linked...
So, some minor disk read error, or maybe a faulty program, the whole partition is gone. You may recover some files, but only the first 512 bytes of them or so. Trust me, it happend more than once...
