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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 9:50 pm 

Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 6:08 pm
Posts: 35
Thanks Gents..

All updated.

Find it here:

http://home.kindredintellect.com/atari/MyIDEDriveManager/Pre/

..Kieran


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 10:18 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
Working well so far - thanks! :)

I will do extensive testing later, and report my findings/recommendations.

Great work!



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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Mon May 02, 2011 8:04 am 

Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 10:49 am
Posts: 187
Location: Salzburg, Austria
flashjazzcat wrote:
Yes, the "clusters" are finished and tested now. Pseudo-quad density partitions on a 2.5" HDD score 65KB/s reads in RWTEST. :)

In the future, if SDX ever happened to implement 1024bps sectors as clusters, we could have 4 in the lower nybble, and either 1 or 3 in the upper nybble. 1 would mean the cluster was made up of 2 x 512bps sectors, while 3 would mean it was made up of 4 x 256bps sectors.

Just a few remarks (Jon and I exchanged several emails about this topic):

Having "virtual" QD sectors on 16-bit only devices is a very good idea, IMO.

But other than that, I don't think larger "virtual" sector sizes are particuarly useful on the Atari (and the term "cluster" is slightly misleading, IMHO).

When you look at the FAT filesystems, you'll see that the cluster size only affects the file allocation table. The physical sector size still is 512 bytes and you only need 512 byte sector buffers to access the filesystem. No matter what cluster size you use, all disk accesses can be split into 512-byte transfers.

But if you use larger "virtual" or "logical" sectors, the sector buffer has to be increased, too. 512 byte buffers are already quite big, for the Atari (you need at least one buffer for every open file handle), having even larger buffers might soon become impractical on the Atari due to higher memory consumption.

I really don't want to discourage you (or Sijmen), and there might be some special cases where 1024 or 2048 byte sectors might be useful, but I don't think a DOS is one of these cases. To overcome the current 16MB/32MB limit it would be better to push the 65535 sector limit upwards. IIRC the KMK/JZ interface uses the (otherwise unused/reserved) location $307 to extend sector numbers to 24 bit. Of course, this is kind of a hack, and might cause older programs doing direct sector I/O to break, but it'd still be a lot easier to handle than those large sectors.

so long,

Hias


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Mon May 02, 2011 9:07 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
Agreed. I'm gonna stick to setting bit 7 (to indicate clusters) with BPS set to the logical sector size, since that's the way it works now, and I doubt it'll ever need to change. :)



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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Wed May 04, 2011 12:31 am 
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Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2003 8:15 am
Posts: 1549
Location: netherlands
Hi Kieran,

Is it possible to add the function of making alterations to a file instead of a real device?
I use sector dumps of my CF-card for usage on Altirra, and such an option would be great.
[These files are raw dumps in 8bit format, 1st word, Lowbyte first, Highbyte second, 2nd word etc....]

Beside this question, I asked Hias to do some extensions to the current CHS-partitiontable.
Number of partitions for logical drives is extended from 8 to 15, they have names in 8 ASCII fixed length.
All partitions have their own optionbyte, the first optionbyte is also the global-option byte.
Densities are SD (half DD), DD (real DD), QD (DoubleDD) and (inverse video)QD (real QD).
[The current code offers also OctalDens and beyond, all on the principle of clustering sectors.]
[I have bit 7 set for drives than can actual set in 8bit mode, these densities are in inverse video]
The Drive-ID of partitions not in use have an 'invalid' drivenumber, $00 or >$08.
No changes to images
Perhaps you can have a look if this influence your idemanager.

Later,
Sijmen.


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Wed May 04, 2011 7:03 am 

Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 10:49 am
Posts: 187
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Hi Sijmen & Kieran!
mr-atari wrote:
Hi Kieran,

Is it possible to add the function of making alterations to a file instead of a real device?
I use sector dumps of my CF-card for usage on Altirra, and such an option would be great.
[These files are raw dumps in 8bit format, 1st word, Lowbyte first, Highbyte second, 2nd word etc....]

myidetool already works transparently with files instead of devices - just use the file path instead of "\\.\PhysicalDriveX". I use this feature a lot when testing (in Linux), and actually on Unix systems there's no difference between devices and files :-)

Quote:
Beside this question, I asked Hias to do some extensions to the current CHS-partitiontable.
Number of partitions for logical drives is extended from 8 to 15, they have names in 8 ASCII fixed length.

To keep things simple I guess it's best to change the CHS partition output to the same format as the SDX LBA output, i.e. have a line "partitions: X max: Y" (just without "boot: Z"), so you can use the number after "max" to determine how many partitions to expect.

I'm not 100% sure about the names, but I guess I might just output them at the very end of the line (after the partition size).

Quote:
Densities are SD (half DD), DD (real DD), QD (DoubleDD) and (inverse video)QD (real QD).

I implemented "virtual QD" (2 256-byte sectors) support for SDX LBA in myidetool, but still have to test it with flashjazzcat's driver. The only change in output is that I use "qd" instead of "QD" in the format column, the partition size is automatically adjusted in this case.

If a partition (on a CHS drive) contains an unknown/invalid density entry I'll print "??" for the density, just like in the SDX LBA format.

@Kieran: I'll send you an updated version of myidetool as soon as I finished testing.

so long,

Hias


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2011 12:21 am 

Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 6:08 pm
Posts: 35
Hias,

Thanks for the info.

Alignment between outputs would be great, but not 100% required (though the code dulication would be nice to eliminate).

The most recent version of my app fully supports opening image files, using the mechanism you mention - very nice being able to just switch the path from a physical drive to a file.

I'll look forward to the update and get things fixed up on this end.

Thanks again!

..Kieran


Last edited by Grunty on Thu May 05, 2011 1:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2011 12:49 am 
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Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2003 8:15 am
Posts: 1549
Location: netherlands
Oeps, Never seen the [..] button for file selection.
Cool, works great :-)
"What a beautiful world"

The new myidetool.exe crashes the app on lauch. Didn't expect this to happen.
Take your time, no hurry, I can beta-test the BIOS using the commandline for now.

Later,
Sijmen.


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2011 9:39 pm 

Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 6:08 pm
Posts: 35
All updated.

Find it here:

http://home.kindredintellect.com/atari/MyIDEDriveManager/Pre/

..Kieran


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2011 7:52 am 

Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 10:49 am
Posts: 187
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Hi Kieran!

Again, an updated version of myidetool:
http://www.horus.com/~hias/tmp/myidetool-110510.zip

This version now supports the final SDX LBA partition table format and adds some (minor) cosmetic changes to the output.

- The partition table header includes the SDX partition table version (V0.9 or V1.0) - you can safely ignore this output, if you like
- Drive numbers are now formatted differently, for example "D03:" is now printed as "D3: ", unassigned drive numbers (previously "D0:" or "D00:") are now output as "---" (CHS format) or "----" (LBA format)

Testing went fine, "real" and "emulated" QD partitions seem to be working fine both in CHS and LBA mode, CHS partition names seem also to work (but myidetool doesn't change them, it only outputs what it finds in the partition table).

Looks like we are approaching a final version!

so long,

Hias


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2011 4:45 am 
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Joined: Mon Jan 12, 2004 5:01 pm
Posts: 85
Location: Reading UK
As I understand it, writing the movie files onto a drive has to be done with care, e.g. to sit between partition and disk image memory? As such there are no 'markers/table' saved to track any of this.

Longer term could an approach be agreed and then support added to this tool for loading movies? Or with the improvements in access speeds using newer drivers will it be practical to stream from a partition?


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:34 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
It's been practical to stream movies from a partition since last year using the SDX drivers. 70KB/s is perfectly adequate. The difference between raw sector reads and reads via the filing system using that driver is only around 10KB/s.



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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2011 9:50 pm 

Joined: Sun Feb 19, 2006 1:33 pm
Posts: 89
I get nearly double the speed using your SDX driver using a Transcend module than I do with the built in SDX RAMDisk (50 vs 25k/sec on reading). I still need to pick up a CF to IDE adapter so I can switch to 512 byte sectors and break the 64k mark.


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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2011 10:18 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 7:27 am
Posts: 98
Location: United Kingdom
RAMdisk is buffered, hence the speed difference. :)



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 Post subject: Re: My IDE Drive Manager
PostPosted: Sun May 29, 2011 2:55 pm 

Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 6:08 pm
Posts: 35
Sorry for the delay (work had the better of me for a while again, there!).

All updated.

Find it here:

http://home.kindredintellect.com/atari/MyIDEDriveManager/Pre/

..Kieran


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