SUMMARY: Copying files onto PCFS floppy is very slow

From: DIJ (tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 14 1992 - 14:15:34 CDT


Hello,

The original query was:

Hello,

I wonder if anyone could tell me why the floppy drive on the SUN is so slow
when large files are being copied on to it when it is mounted as a PCFS
filesystem. For example copying a 935KByte file took 12 minutes. The machine
is an IPC running 4.1.1.

Tom.

I had 13 replies which all said use mtools. I have an anonymous ftp site for
it if anyone is interested. I also phoned SUN about this one and they said
it was probably to do with the blocksize which is limited to 20 bytes (or
kbytes?) There were no plans to fix the driver but the engineer thought
performance might be better on SVR4. The interesting thing is, the performance
is related to file size, i.e. the bigger the file, the slower (exponentially)
it gets. i.e. one 935k file takes 12 minutes while 9 x 100k files take about
2 minutes altogether. The driver must be pretty sick.

Thanks to:

Daniel@europarc.xerox.com
Eckhard.Rueggeberg@ts.go.dlr.de
engp1186@nuscc.nus.sg (Won-Soon Lau)
sbeard%london@gte.com
(Peter J. Welcher -- math FACULTY <pjw@math30.sma.usna.navy.MIL>)
peter@Civil.Concordia.CA
nicky@davinci.concordia.ca
John Malick (john@sse.com)
syslen@schur.math.nwu.edu (Len Evens)
Andrew Purshottam <andy@autodesk.com>
"Emmet P. Gray" <egray@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu>
Jon Peatfield <J.S.Peatfield@damtp.cambridge.ac.uk>
Tim Gibbs <gibbs@src.bae.co.uk>



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