Slow PCMCIA>Compact Flash speeds

[radiokida]

Hi

Doing a bit more configuration of my ClassicWB setup, I have a PCMCIA>Compact Flash card and a Sandisk 4GB card in that.

ClassicWB Full is up and running on the Amiga 1200, I have installed CFD and FAT95. Formatted the compact flash on the Amiga (which actually formatted it as FAT32 straight away).

Plugged the compact flash into my PC and copied some KillerGorilla WHDLoad .rar packs on to the compact flash card.

Plugged the card back into the Amiga, opened up Dopus, and started to extract the KillerGorilla pack from the PCMCIA compact flash card to the Game dir of my ClassicWB install.

It.... goes.... very.... slowly. Took about 20 seconds just to extract one disk of Zool 2, at that rate it would take a very very long time to extract the full pack to my Games dir.

I used addbuffers 1000 to both the compact flash card and the Amiga HD, but it is still very slow.

Have I missed something?

[demolition]

Is the A1200 accelerated? RAR can be slow to decompress, particularly on a plain A1200. I suggest you boot your ClassicWB on the PC in WinUAE, set the speed to max with JIT enabled. It'll probably decompress your files 100x faster or even more.

[radiokida]

Hi

Nope no acceleration. I guess its the WinUAE route then.

My other option would be to use WinRar on the PC to extract the pack, then copy the extracted pack to the CF card. Will this mess up filenames however? as I've heard extracting Amiga archives on a PC can cause issues with the extracted files, is this still the case even with Windows 7 which supports long filenames etc.

[demolition]

Should be fine to copy the already extracted games as I have done that for many games and they are all working fine, but it will still take a long time to copy so many files using the A1200, and will be a lot faster in WinUAE. I started out copying the extracted files on my accelerated A1200, but after seeing how long it would take (many WHDLoad game installations have many small files which is why it takes a long time), I went and did it all on the PC instead.

[radiokida]

One of the reasons I wanted to do it all on the Amiga was that when I did it through WinUAE, with my Amiga CF HD plugged in to the PC and the files copying from a PC directory, I would often have bad block and checksum errors during the copy operation.

This would then lead to the CF HD developing problems booting when plugged back in the Amiga. I had set the MaxTransfer properly (1FE00), and everything would be fine until midway through copying files to it on the PC via WinUAE.

Wasn't really sure why it did that, but I don't want it to happen again so was going to try and do it all on the Amiga from now on.

But I really don't want to have to leave it going for days... so my options are limited I guess.

[demolition]

I had a few problems with file corruption first time I tried to copy all the files, but they were sorted out when I changed the Amiga filesystem from FFS (now using PFS3).