Morning Ade, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I must admit, I was assuming Sinclair had used 1024 byte blocks on his > microdrives - I may need to be corrected on that. I suspect that 1024 is correct. Although, the freespace/total space numbers (on a DIR or STAT) was reported in sectors with a sector being 512 bytes if I remember correctly. I think each file had a 64 byte overhead on the first sector for the file header which was also the directory entry. However, having said that, I have never been able to read the 64 byte file header, or seen it, directly from the file - even though I've seen it written down that it can be done. I'm pretty sure I even used a disc sector editor program to check it out - still no joy. I remain to be convinced of the actual existense of this phantom 64 byte header per file actually 'in' the file. > Stephen Usher's description of the perils of formatting is amongst the best > I've ever seen. It's true that you can lose staggering amounts of disk space > to a bad file format... Yes. I remember the old days when as you added a bigger disc to DOS/Windows, you didn't get as much extra space as you thought. The bigger the disc, the bigger the cluster size so the bigger your small files actually were in reality. This was due to FAT16 (the forerunner to FAT32) only having 16 bit numbers - so if you got too many MB on the new drive, it 'adjusted' the cluster size to allow the whole disc (subject to some other limit) into a 16 bit number. Very helpful indeed - not! > However, I think anything in the 3 to 4 million microdrive equivalents will > probably last most of us for a while yet (unlike a 400GB PC disk, which at > current rates will be obsolete in 18 minutes and 23 seconds). Hmmm. I'm just wondering how long it would take to feed the afore mentions 3.x million cartridges into Dilwyn's Super Disc Indexer/Labeller program to catalogue the contents of them all. Let's see : * assume 30 seconds per scan (that's optimistic!) * assume 3.5 m illion cartridges. So, that's 1.75 million seconds, not including run up/run down and swapping over time. That works out at 29,166 minutes and 40 seconds. That is 486 hours, 6 minutes and 40 seconds or 20 days 6 hours 6 minutes and 40 seconds of continual time. That's a hell of a lot of cartridge labels too :o) Cheers, Norman. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
