From: Greg Haerr <greg_at_censoft.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 16:12:08 -0800

> why don't we just partition the disk? lets say 10 MB for the rockbox stuff
> so archos firmware can find it and the rest is NTFS.

Four reasons this is going the wrong direction:

1. Requiring NTFS would require users to repartition
their large drive, likely causing data loss, just to try/run
Rockbox. If they switched back, NTFS songs wouldn't be
available.

2. NTFS requires more complicated read & write code,
using more memory and making the Rockbox image larger.

3. USB/NTFS drivers may not be available for Win98
and other systems wanting to transfer data to the drive.
Same for formatting/partitioning utilities.

4. The current implementation of the FAT32 read/write
code actually is quite quick, and all FAT sectors are cached,
which is the biggest potential issue with FAT filesystem speed.

If disk file read/write speed is an issue, which I dont think
it is, there's a couple of things that could help:

1. Reformat the HD using a larger cluster size. Increased
cluster sizes allow larger contiguous sector reading/writing.

2. The system could use asynchronous ata_sector_read/writes
without waiting for completion, (Bjorn/Linus is this possible
with the Archos HW?), combined with a slightly modified
buffering mechanism.

Regards,

Greg
Received on 2002-11-17