fine-tuning os 3.9 and hard drive access

[beltrixx]

Hi everybody

I installed recently amigaos 3.9 on my A1200 but after working with it for some hours I noticed that overall speed was a bit slow and I'm wondering if there are some hints or tricks to improve performance.

I've removed the backdrop image and cached the images to "other memory" in order to save graphics memory but would like to improve hard drive access speed.

I would like to improve hard disk access particularly because when I double click the "C" drawer (for instance) it takes more than 10 seconds to display its content...
I don't know if these access times are "normal" for my system or not.

I would like to know if there is some new filesystem or another way to partition / format the drive in order to gain performance. I used HDToolbox which came with the Workbench 3.1 disk sets, installed WB 3.1 and updated to amiga os 3.9.

I'm using a stock A1200 with a 8 Gb IDE hard drive and a Microbotics 1230 Accelerator card with 32 mb RAM.

thanks in advance.

Manel.

[Amigaz]

Check this thread

Don't forget to use a faster filesystem like PFS3 or SFS
Also make sure your kickrom is remapped to your fastram and the 68030's cache/burst is on....you can launch that with CPU CACHE BURST FASTROM at the start of your startup-sequence or in user startup...

[beltrixx]

Thanks for your reply & explanations, Amigaz.

But I'm still in doubt. I've reformatted my hard drive using HDTool utility bundled with OS3.9 (instead of using the one that comes with the Workbench 3.1 disk set) and would like to know if the "Standard File System" that appears in HDTool is the same SFS you are advising me to install, because I don't notice any hard drive access improvement.

I've also noticed that when you select "Standard File System" another option called "Fast Filesystem" (The old Amiga filesystem???) is enabled by default.

I need a bit more light to fight this darkness ;(

Thanks in advance!

[vic20owner]

No, SFS is "Smart File System". Standard File System is SLOW...

http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/SFS/

[Kulwant]

Hi,

Depends on what you are using to access the C: drawer to. I just tried on mine and using ClassAction (filemanager) it takes less than 2 seconds (311 objects), whilst WB takes 10 seconds here too. Probably because it scans each file to determine which sort of icon to display for it. If you turn off deficons support, that might speed things up for WB - but to be honest how many people actually still use WB for launching progs/file management etc?

Kulwant

[beltrixx]

Thanks everybody for your comments, that have helped me understand what I had to look for.

I've read a detailed SFS install guide from here and have partitioned & formatted successfully my HD using SFS.

I've noticed not a boost but an improvement in hard drive access mainly because I was making a bit mistake I hadn't noticed : CDROM & Hard Drive sharing the same data cable !!! my god...

I will start tweaking my system to get the max performance possible for a 68030 A1200.

Greetings.

Manel.