Defrag for SpartaDOS?

[Dopeyman06]

Is there a defragmenter app/file for .atr and/or Hard Drive images under SpartaDOS? Or does CLEANUP.COM do the same thing?

 

[danwinslow]

Would it do anything? I would guess that the overall data amounts are so small, and the general overhead on the atari side dwarfs any modern device IO time overhead. Not sure it would a noticeable difference. Are you using an actual HD?

[Dopeyman06]

4 hours ago, danwinslow said:

Would it do anything? I would guess that the overall data amounts are so small, and the general overhead on the atari side dwarfs any modern device IO time overhead. Not sure it would a noticeable difference. Are you using an actual HD?

No. no actual HD. I was just curious if there was something out there like that.

[+kheller2]

Create an empty ATR

Copy files to it from the fragmented ATR.

 

?

[StickJock]

15 hours ago, kheller2 said:

Create an empty ATR

Copy files to it from the fragmented ATR.

 

?

LOL.

 

Back in the '80s, I had thought about writing a tool to sort files on Atari DOS.  IIRC, I never got around to it, but I had planned on sorting the directory and updating the 6-bit file number in all of the affected sectors.  I had also considered a defrag tool to speed up file reads.  One of the things that I remember worrying about when designing the tools was that a power outage would leave the floppy corrupted. 

 

I'm not sure if I had ever considered this *obvious* approach of just copying the files to a new floppy.  Probably because floppies were pricey considering that I was a student.  I could even have kept it on the original disk (since the label was already written on) by doing a disk copy to a spare disk and then a file copy back to the original disk.

 

Anyway, thanks for the memory... and the laugh (at myself!).

 

[BillC]

3 hours ago, StickJock said:

I could even have kept it on the original disk (since the label was already written on) by doing a disk copy to a spare disk and then a file copy back to the original disk.

This could be done without a second floppy if the machine has a memory upgrade, copying the files to RAMdisk. It could even be done with a 64K 800XL using an MIO.

[StickJock]

7 hours ago, BillC said:

This could be done without a second floppy if the machine has a memory upgrade, copying the files to RAMdisk. It could even be done with a 64K 800XL using an MIO.

Yup.  But there's still the potential for a corrupted disk if the power goes out.

 

[BillC]

5 minutes ago, StickJock said:

Yup.  But there's still the potential for a corrupted disk if the power goes out.

Even with defragmentation software there would probably be data loss if interrupted by a power outage.

You could use a small UPS, the computer/disk drive consume less than 100W.

Another way if you have some type of floppy emulator(Sdrive/SIO2SD/SIO2PC/etc.) would be to use a blank ATR as the destination, this would be a a back-up before the disk is rewritten .

 

[_The Doctor__]

In the BBS days, we made sure certain files were in certain areas of the hard drive for quicker retrieval. The hard drives had different seek times across the range of the drives tracks. By keeping the least accessed largest files contiguous in the slower areas of the drives, it made for a better experience. This by extension was how most people who where aware at the time laid out their partitions and files to make all of that downloaded goodness enjoyable to retrieve. There were a number of method to de-fragment the drives, all essentially copying the data to an empty section of the partition, or to another partition... but in order to keep up the access speed, many of us had batch files to put them back in the order we needed to keep access times down, and the experience as snappy as possible. Most modern devices don't have any real means to control the media at this level anymore... except...

 

There were up until a few years ago, a few spinning disk utilities for wintel x86 x64 modern machines to align hard disk data to speed up transfers.. if I recall  align might have been the name or something close to that. The utilities made sure data fell correctly on the surface so it could be read all at once or the least possible times by the drives internal controller... good luck digging them up... seems there were skirmishes over the formatters/utilities/and drive manufacturers at some point. Making the stand alone utils removed from the low level tool chains for hard drive geometry set up. So acronis, hgst, paragon, crystal, made alignment offerings when wd and hgst / travelstore et all no longer supplied such wonders in their tools...

Edited May 9, 2022 by _The Doctor__

[GoodByteXL]

On 5/2/2022 at 6:37 PM, danwinslow said:

Would it do anything?

No - there is simply no need for it as SDX uses unlike Atari type DOS relative file access. Jumping to any sector anywhere on the drive is blazing fast compared to Atari type DOS.

And, if you expanded a directory by copying too many files to it, approx. more than 200, it will never decrease. Empty it and delete it.

To cleanup there is a tool for it on the tool kit.

[+Larry]

5 hours ago, GoodByteXL said:

No - there is simply no need for it as SDX uses unlike Atari type DOS relative file access. Jumping to any sector anywhere on the drive is blazing fast compared to Atari type DOS.

And, if you expanded a directory by copying too many files to it, approx. more than 200, it will never decrease. Empty it and delete it.

To cleanup there is a tool for it on the tool kit.

Atari Dos is considered Sequential or?

 

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/file-access-methods-in-operating-system/

[Mrshoujo]

Atari DOS, as may be well known, uses file numbers in the sector link info in the last 3 bytes of a sector. The only way to know the sector chain is to follow each one in sequence.

 

SpartaDOS VTOCs link you to the 1st sector in the chain where it has the sector sequence mapped for you and if large enough, the next sector in the file map, and it continues on like that. Alphabetizing the VTOC is possible easily under SpartaDOS as I'm sure lots of users has done this to a disk. Since file numbering isn't used the way Atari DOS does it, defragging is very well possible. I always thought there was already a utility for that. Maybe there really is no need because in relative terms, there's just not as many huge files.

[flashjazzcat]

As mentioned, defragging is primarily about seek/access times, and while this is irrelevant to modern flash storage devices (which have constant access times) and possibly spinning HDDs as well on the Atari (since both can saturate the Atari with data regardless), it's probably relevant to floppy drives, especially those using high-speed sector skew (you'll want the file to occupy contiguous sectors for optimal read performance). SDFS is prone to fragmentation just like any other file system, and the fact it facilitates random file pointer seeks by abstracting the file linkage from the data won't make reading the file sequentially any faster if fragments of it are strewn all over a floppy drive.

 

Not that I consider this much of a real-world problem, however.