fastest hardfile or directory ?

[turrican3]

is there a difference of speed between hardfile and directory and what's the fastest sfs afs or others format ?

[Shoonay]

I *think* a simple Amiga user/play might not notice any difference between a hardfile or directory, BUT I'd suggest a hardfile with SFS.
There are some problems with the file attribiutes and stuff with the amiga-special tags when using a directory hd...

Anyways, I'd suggest a real SFS formatted Ami HD

[Toni Wilen]

It depends. Some access types are faster, some slower.

I recommend directory as long as you have NTFS filesystem. MUCH easier to use. ("impossible" to get corrupted from Amiga-side accidentally)

Hardfiles are only ok if you know what are you doing

[Shoonay]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Hardfiles are only ok if you know what are you doing

Here's that question from me again Toni, but what do you mean? Setting a 5gb file on FAT32 partition?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Shoonay

Here's that question from me again Toni, but what do you mean? Setting a 5gb file on FAT32 partition?

For example >4G (or >2g) hardfile usually means guaranteed data loss sooner or later if you use too old AmigaOS or filesystem version. (and of course emulator is blamed for it.. yes, uaehf.device is 64-bit compatible but filesystem and low level utilities like format-command also need to be 64-bit compatible)

[Shoonay]

Oh, that's why...
Never happened to me, never blamed the emu, honest

[alexh]

Just out of curiosity but how does WinUAE handle saving Amiga compatible names when in directory mode??

For example "Amber_*" is a valid file/dir in Amiga but not PC?

[eLowar]

Heh, I can answer that since I already looked / asked the same question (though for pratical reasons, not just out of curiosity). UAE saves name mappings in _UAEFSDB.___ files in every dir with such files. WinUAE can also (and does by default) put the info in alternate data streams on NTFS, attached to each file with an illegal name. The actual filenames are then generated from the Amiga filenames when possible (e.g. uae__Amber__ or some such) and on collisions or if the name's otherwise not possible they're random strings.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by alexh

Just out of curiosity but how does WinUAE handle saving Amiga compatible names when in directory mode??

For example "Amber_*" is a valid file/dir in Amiga but not PC?

It has been explained somewhere here already, I think.

Anyway, there are two methods:

Common:

"illegal" characters in file/directory name is replaced with _'s and __uae___ is added to beginning of name + some crap to end of name if same name already exists (only if file should not be same)

NTFS: (really means any filesystem that supports streams)

Original name, mangled name, protection flags and comment is stored in NTFS stream named _UAEFSDB.___ with file/directory.

Non-NTFS:

Original name, mangled name, protection flags and comment is stored in special file called _UAEFSDB.___ in current directory. (can contain multiple UAEFSDB entries)

(I was too slow)

[eLowar]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

It has been explained somewhere here already, I think.

I don't think I've seen it on EAB. You did explain it to me recently though (that is where to find the format of the records, I had already found the streams ), maybe that's what you're thinking of?

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

(I was too slow)

[turrican3]

ok i don't want to loose my data then i stay with dierctory it seems to be more safe.
really thank you for the reply.