Best File System for CF Cards on a Real Amiga

[fitzsteve]

+1 what Thomas says loading Quake or even Doom on FFS takes forever but on SFS its nice and quick, even acceptable on native IDE.

Would love to try PFS4 myself, can't wait till thats free

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Peter

@ Thomas, so if you had a choice between SFS and PFS3 regardless of cost - which would you use Thomas?

I prefer PFS3, probably because of subjective reasons. I bought PFS2 when Amiga was still famous and was very impressed when I first used it. I was not at all impressed by SFS when it came out, mostly because it didn't need it and therefore didn't care.

However, PFS3 is a commercial product which comes with complete documentation, utilities and (at least back then) support. SFS is a hobby project. Documentation and utilities are outdated if present at all and support is non-existent. Arrogant behaviour of the current maintainer is another subjective reason.

[Peter]

Thanks Thomas - interesting answer, looks like I need to get PFS3 - I only have have PFS2.
I'm looking forward to setting this up.

Thanks everyone for their comments - keep it going, it's interesting reading...

[Mad-Matt]

FFS isnt as bad as its made out to be. OS39 made important changes with ffs that makes it perform better then the os31ffs vs sfs,pfs that everyone remebers and has slagged of ffs since.

I havent used pfs, but sfs isnt measurable faster then ffs with big loads like doom or quake on my 040/25. sfs tends to take forever when deleting files though making it useless for a fast web cache that I inteded to use sfs for.

I keep ffs purly because its completely stable and works with all the disk tools ive been used to for the last 20 years, I dont like change lol . (Thats not to imply those tools are needed )

[stefcep2]

What's wrong with fat95?

[Allen1]

Originally Posted by stefcep2

What's wrong with fat95?

Fat95 is used to read PC formatted drives like a compact flash card that is used both on a PC using various card readers and the Amiga via the PCMCIA slot as in a method of transferring files between the 2 systems. The Amiga cannot boot from a device that is PC formatted but fat95 is very good at doing the above.

[stefcep2]

Originally Posted by Allen1

Fat95 is used to read PC formatted drives like a compact flash card that is used both on a PC using various card readers and the Amiga via the PCMCIA slot as in a method of transferring files between the 2 systems. The Amiga cannot boot from a device that is PC formattoed but fat95 is very good at doing the above.

Aha. Thank you!

[rare_j]

Slightly off topic here, sorry.
If fat95 were in rom would it be possible to boot from a fat95 partition? would you need extra software to mount it first?

[Allen1]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Slightly off topic here, sorry.
If fat95 were in rom would it be possible to boot from a fat95 partition? would you need extra software to mount it first?

The answer to that unfortunately is no. Fat95 is only a means for the Amiga's operating system to see files on a PC Fat formatted drive as in the compact flash transfer method. It still is a brilliant piece of software and does what it is meant to do fantastically well. The Amiga itself uses a different format and while it is capable of reading files via the fat95 and crossdos methods, it can't really use those files to boot up or anything more useful than reading a text document or viewing a picture that was meant for a PC (using other programs), it does however let you transfer files to and from a CF card and the likes that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to do.

I think there is a way to use a CF card via the PCMCIA as a hard drive but it needs a floppy disk to boot it up first, I never tried that myself so I couldn't advise you how to go about it.

[thomas]

Actually FAT95 is an Amiga file system like each other and as such it can be stored in the Amiga partition table and you can boot from FAT partitions. However, it would still be an Amiga partition table and if you put this CF card into a PC it would not recognise it.

The author of FAT95 knew all that and he wrote a small utility which can create an Amiga partition table in the empty space between the PC partition table and the first partition. With this trick it is in fact possible to boot from a real FAT partition (real = created by Windows or another PC operating system). The utility is called boot95 and comes with FAT95.

Anyway FAT is not a good choice to store Amiga files because it cannot save all Amiga file attributes (namely the executable and script flags as well as file notes).

[Peter]

I have WB3.1 installed on my Work partition while I set up SFS on my System partition...
This is on a real Amiga A1200 not winuae.

I have updated the file system and set what I think are the correct max transfer and mask settings for the partition and with a re-boot all looks well with DH0:NDOS recognised. Now I want to format DH0 under SFS - how do I do that, I didn't think I could just use a standard WB Format process...??

Can I just right mouse click menu/format? and expect it to be SFS formated?

[cosmicfrog]

just do a quick format

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Peter

how do I do that, I didn't think I could just use a standard WB Format process...??

Yes, you can. You will notice that the Format program does not offer you FastFileSystem, International and Directory Cache checkboxes for the SFS partitions. That's because SFS is a custom file system. But the Format command is still the same.

[Peter]

Thanks for the confirmation Thomas!

[daxb]

You need sfsformat for some switches

[Peter]

Not getting much time at present to get my A1200 fully set up but anyway I got the CF card formatted with SFS - so far so good - these are the setting I have used for a...

2GB Transcend CF Card using a no ribbon cable CF Card Adaptor, plugs straight into MB IDE

Identifier 0x53465300
Version 1
Rev 1.279

Mask 0x7ffffffe

Max Transfer 0x1fe00

Block Size 512



Settings are taken From KG's guide mainly.

I'm guessing these settings would work for any CF Card 4GB or under...?

[thomas]

Yes, that's right.

BTW, Mask and MaxTransfer are not dependent on the device used, they are specific to the controller. 0x7ffffffe and 0x1fe00 are the correct values for the internal IDE controller, no matter whether a real harddrive or a CF card is used. MaxTransfer errors can as well happen on harddrives.

That so many people currently stumble across the MaxTransfer problen with their new CF cards IMHO comes from the fact that using a CF card is modern and many people change now.

Probably many people who change from HDD to CF formerly used a preinstalled HDD and now set up a mass storage device with HDToolbox for the first time. Or they just don't remember the important settings because they installed their HDD such a long time ago.

I don't believe that MaxTransfer problems are less likely to happen with a HDD than with a CF card. These errors even happen in WinUAE when using a HDF connected to the emulated IDE port.

[Peter]

Got my other A1200 Set up with my Apollo 1240 28Mhz Accelerator, thought it might be interesting to post some speed results from the CF Cards.

I haven't really done any tests before so the results don't mean much to me but I would welcome comments and comparisons....

(SysSpeed Results)

A1200 (Apollo 040) Reports 19.27 Mips
Speed in BYTES/SEC (DH0 - 1,353,583) - (DH1 - 1,342,034) (SFS Formatted)

A1200 (Blizzard 030) Reports 8.56 Mips
Speed in BYTES/SEC (DH0 - 1,655,646) - (DH1 - 2,184,533) (FFS Formatted)

What other details should I add here that would be relevant to the test do you think?

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by Peter

Got my other A1200 Set up with my Apollo 1240 28Mhz Accelerator, thought it might be interesting to post some speed results from the CF Cards.

I haven't really done any tests before so the results don't mean much to me but I would welcome comments and comparisons....

(SysSpeed Results)

A1200 (Apollo 040) Reports 19.27 Mips
Speed in BYTES/SEC (DH0 - 1,353,583) - (DH1 - 1,342,034) (SFS Formatted)

A1200 (Blizzard 030) Reports 8.56 Mips
Speed in BYTES/SEC (DH0 - 1,655,646) - (DH1 - 2,184,533) (FSS Formatted)

What other details should I add here that would be relevant to the test do you think?

The IDE read/write speed is slower with a faster accelerator?

[alexh]

Slower accelerator and much slower file system (assuming he meant to type FFS) yeilds the best results.

Something has to be wrong here.

All I can think of is that one is IDE and the other SCSI. One has RAM the other doesn't etc. Or the results are transposed.