=========================================== Short: Smart Filesystem 4th BETA version Author: hjohn@xs4all.nl Version: 0.85 =========================================== This filesystem is BETA -- this means it is not finished and may potentially destroy all your data. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! For more information, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/SFS ----------- What's new? ----------- 4 August 1998, changes for version 0.85: - Requesters which ask for a SFS disk to be inserted will now be retried automatically when a disk is actually inserted. - SFS now guarantees data is commited atleast every 20 seconds, even if the disk is being accessed continuously. - BUGFIX : The filesystem no longer gets confused when it thinks a disk is inserted twice. This fixes problems with omniscsi.device. - BUGFIX : Renaming a file to an empty name with the workbench now returns 'object name invalid' instead of 'object not found'. - BUGFIX : Creating a dir with the same name as a file no longer deletes the file. - BUGFIX : 100 character limit is now enforced, instead of allowing you to create names of any length. - Copyback mode added to internal caching system. This helps a lot to speed up small write operations. I also tweaked the cache system a bit for performance. - BUGFIX : Creating files larger than 32 MB using SetFileSize() now works correctly. This fixes a problem with creating large file disks using Shapeshifter. - BUGFIX : Write protection status is now checked each time a disk is inserted, not just at startup. - BUGFIX : Reading directories has been made a bit more robust which will fix problems with some programs. - Error messages returned by SFS when there was an error accessing the device are improved. - Included SFScheck in the archive -- this is a program to check the structure of your SFS disk. It will report any errors it finds but won't make any modifications. Read its docs and use it reguraly if you value your data! ----------- Introduction ----------- Smart Filesystem is a new filesystem for your Amiga. A filesystem's main purpose is to store files on a disk in such a way that they can be located and used quickly. How this is done is up to the filesystem. The way information is stored on your disk has a large impact on speed and space efficiency, and so these factors can vary a lot from filesystem to filesystem. Smart Filesystem was created to provide you with an alternative to the Fast Fileystem. Smart Filesystem makes more efficient use of your disk space, has better performance in most areas and will allow for new features never seen before in an Amiga filesystem. ----------- Features ----------- * Fast reading of directories. * Fast seeking, even in extremely large files. * Blocksizes of 512 bytes up to 32768 bytes (32 kB) are supported. * Supports large partitions. The limit is about 2000 GB, but it can be more depending on the blocksize. * Support for partitions larger than 4 GB or located (partially) beyond the 4 GB barrier on your drive. There is support for the New Style Devices which support 64 bit access, the 64-bit trackdisk commands and SCSI direct. * The length of file and directory names can be 100 characters. * The size of a file is limited to slightly less than 2 GB. * Modifying data on your disk is very safe. Even if your system is resetted, crashes or suffers from powerloss your disk will not be corrupted and will not require long validation procedures before you will be able to use it again. In the worst case you will only lose the last few modifications made to the disk. * There is a built-in configurable read-ahead cache system which tries to speed up small disk accesses. This cache has as a primary purpose to speed up directory reading but also works very well to speed up files read by applications which use small buffers. * Disk space is used very efficiently. * Supports Notification and Examine All. * Supports Soft links (hard links are not supported for now). * Using the SFSformat command you can format your SFS partition with case sensitive or case insensitive file and directory names. Default is case insensitive (like FFS). For more information, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/SFS or read the included documentation.