Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 11:04:15 -0500
From: Jim Leonard
What I would love to test is Central Point Backup (PC
Backup?) prior to
version 6, which is the only version I had available to test. Versions
prior to 6 are supposed to contain code that supports the Option Board I
have in my 5160 for additional speed -- however, I'm not sure how much
speedup I could expect, since some of the faster programs in the
shootout must have been operating at a 1:1 intereave (I was writing all
40 tracks both sides in less than 30 seconds per disk; can it get any
faster than that?).
I'll dig out the old FastBack and see if I've got an older CP backup--
I may well have.
If you're formatting then writing, then an OB might be faster, but
probably not when simply writing to a formatted diskette, assuming
that the sector layout is skewed appropriately to allow for seek and
head settling times.
In the bad old days of WD 17xx diskette controllers, we had a copy
program that formatted and wrote backup data in one pass, as long as
the data didn't have any of the "special" bytes that the WD chip
interprets differently during a format operation.
Cheers,
Chuck