Test reports
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Test reports
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»PFS2 is a file system, that has special capabilities. If installed on the Amiga it is fully compatible to the fast file system. Most outstanding is, that whatever happens, the disks (hard disk or floppy disk) are always validated. That means: If during a write access the Amiga crashes, the power fails, the Amiga is switched off, this doesn't matter!! After that the Amiga boots as if nothing had happened. But the just saved file is gone, too. Another special feature is, that if you work with DirOpus 4.2 (e.g.)
| e.g. | System:.deldir |
in the Lister you can get the last 30 deleted files back!
Who wants to install this file system, you should exactly know, what you do! (Backup!!!)
On the CD of PFS2 the file system is available in various processor versions (and in addition the game Kang Fu in the full version).
You should exactly read the detailed AmigaGuide manual, which is also available in German.
A little hurdle is, that there are various PD clones of the original HDTOOLBOX program, which can format and install a hard disk, but cannot write a completely different (new) file system into the RigidDiskBlock (RDB) and additionally set a completely differen mask.
If you own such a thing on the Workbench, you become puzzled.
Best is to use the original HDTOOLBOX from the Workbench on disk!
Within the manual are screenshots of various steps. The mask should be set exactly as described in the manual, because it differs from the presets of the FFS. If you don't do that strange program crashes and error messages might occur.
The hard disk, of course, has to be formatted in PFS2 format.
In addition I get a strange error message from my A4000/30-50MHz/OS3.1 while booting. When switching on the Amiga the POWER-LED flashes 6x and I get an 80000025 07002210 -error message.
After that the A4000/30 continues booting normally.
I expect the FFS in the OS3.1-ROM tries to boot from the hard disk and then finds out, that the hard disk has no FastFileSystem.
I installed the file system on the hard disk of my previous A1200 with Blizzard1230-IV-turbo board and OS3.0, I don't get this error message there and PFS2 is terrific fast. I cannot say that about the A4000/30, which doesn't puzzle me, because this computer is low "Motorlarized" on this computer.
You needn't try to use ReOrg, DiskSalv or Quarterbakctools with a PFS2-HD partition. These partitions are always recognized as NO DOS.
It is much fun, If you have in addition to a Quantum Fireball 1.2 GB, connected to the internal AT bus an SCSI-Oktagon controller, which has 4 MB Zip-RAM in addition to a Quantum-Maverick-520-MB hard disk.
This looks fine, if you get these 4 MB to the standard 16 MB Fast-RAM, so you get 17-18 MB of "free" Fast-RAM...
When I wanted to make a backup of a PFS2 partition with the program Diavolo and Diavolo usually uses the COMPLETE memory the program hanged up and didn't practically nothing, when it met the slow 4MB-24bit-RAM from the Oktagon controller. Rien ne va plus.
Well, I thought, we have PFS2, my Amiga and me... Reset...
After that the partition was defect. And you can't make anything about it, see above.
So keep your fingers away from 24bit-RAM, if files with a size of multiple megabytes should be written and the RAM is used completely!!
I think, such crazy things weren't planned by the programmer Michiel Petl, who wrote and developped this file system for years.
If floppy disks have been formatted with this file system, the files are very much faster and can be deleted quicker, this is true especially for HD disks.
But the disks should be formatted completely, not as mentioned in the manual with quick format, because I got a nice crash when writing to that disk.
Blocks out of disk space This error message is not supposed to be present in revision 4.2. This bug was that bad, that I had to move the mount file for PF0 (that is the name of DF0 in PFS2) to storage:, because when inserting the "bad" PFS2 disk the Amiga crashed at once, if PF0 was mounted during booting.
The disk could be used again, after I completely formatted it with FFS and then with the new file system FPS2 (as PF0)!! It is also a pity, that there isn't a bootblock for this fast file system (yet?).
If you don't notice these special bugs, which might only happened on my copmuter, you get a file system, that is hard to be matched, especially if the Amiga has some HP more under the bonnet.
I added two test, which show the difference of the speeds quite clear:
Test config.
A4000/30-50MHz (Blizzard 4030), OS 3.1, Quantum Fireball 1.2 GB connected to the internal AT bus
MKSoft DiskSpeed 4.2 Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development ------------------------------------------------------------ CPU: 68030 AmigaOS Version: 40.70 Normal Video DMA Device: dh0: Buffers: 70 Comments: DiskSpeed 4.2 CPU Speed Rating: 2447 Testing directory manipulation speed. File Create: 185 files/sec | CPU Available: 6% File Open: 260 files/sec | CPU Available: 0% Directory Scan: 1578 files/sec | CPU Available: 0% File Delete: 259 files/sec | CPU Available: 0% Seek/Read: 525 seeks/sec | CPU Available: 31%
MKSoft DiskSpeed 4.2 Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development ------------------------------------------------------------ CPU: 68030 AmigaOS Version: 40.70 Normal Video DMA Device: dh0: Buffers: 30 Comments: DiskSpeed 4.2 CPU Speed Rating: 2451 Testing directory manipulation speed. File Create: 45 files/sec | CPU Available: 68% File Open: 147 files/sec | CPU Available: 32% Directory Scan: 635 files/sec | CPU Available: 2% File Delete: 377 files/sec | CPU Available: 3% Seek/Read: 128 seeks/sec | CPU Available: 71%
Uwe Mann <Uwe.Mann@t-online.de>«
