PE>> Remember I was telling you how I switched all my data to FAT so
 PE>> that I could make use of the 14400k diskcache for FAT (as opposed
 PE>> to the 2048 cache available on HPFS) and it turned out that it was
 PE>> worse?  Well I did some investigation today, and found that I
 PE>> couldn't even copy 24k of files to NUL: and then copy them again
 PE>> without it reaccessing the disk?!  I would have expected read-only
 PE>> to work.

 PE>> I have 64 meg of memory, all IDE/EIDE, PCI, OS/2 3.0, and observed
 PE>> the following things:

 PC>> Have you tried ibm386fs (HPFS386).  it comes with OS/2 Warp Server
 PC>> edition. running it here and it FLYS with over 6mb of cache.

 PE> Well, I've tried a version that comes if you download sufficient
 PE> number of patches from IBM's site over the last 4 years, and get
 PE> excellent performance from things which gain from having the extra
 PE> memory (like messagebase rescanning, BBS QWK packing), but really
 PE> lousy on an SQPACKP.  Something like 4 times longer than HPFS16 for
 PE> the SAME CACHE SIZE (2 meg)!  I found that if I used HPFS386 and did a

have you tried giving it over 6mb of cache? that's when you see a speed
increase. otherwise it runs the same speed as hpfs16.

 PE> "copy /b AVTECH.SQD nul:" followed by a SQPACKP, it would be faster
 PE> than HPFS16, (even including time for the nonsense copy) but
 PE> otherwise, 4 times slower.  I was tempted to add the "copy
/b" to my
 PE> overnight processing, but decided instead to just not do overnight
 PE> packing.  I then ditched HPFS in favour of FAT, for security (e.g.
 PE> when I attempted to install OS/2 to an LBA drive on my 3rd IDE, it
 PE> trashed my HPFS partition and then trapped (after installing 6
 PE> disks!), but when I used FAT, it did the same thing except didn't
 PE> trash my disk.  It took me a month before I was fully recovered from
 PE> the original trashing!  I saw something in one of the OS/2 fixpacks
 PE> about it incorrectly handling > 2 gig disks.  Not sure how you are
 PE> meant to install the fixpack before you've installed OS/2 though!  I
 PE> rang IBM to see what their solution was, and they said to move the
 PE> disk to my first IDE, because IDE only handled the first 2 drives or
 PE> something.  I didn't believe a word of it, but I did it, and it
 PE> worked!  I think what reality is is that there is a bug in OS/2 when
 PE> dealing with the >2 gig drives on > 2nd IDE.  It seems it wasn't
 PE> handling the LBA properly, as I ran a program to display cyls/heads
 PE> etc and it reported stupid values (in a DOS box under OS/2), whilst it
 PE> worked fine on real DOS.  BFN.  Paul.

I see. i had some trouble with my LBA 1gb disk here. if i didn't have it at
IDE Primary 0 then i couldn't modify it with PartitionMagic or Fdisk. (the
partition mapping on drive 2 may be damaged ). and it made my first drive
make strange noises, but when i put it as disk 0 then it worked fine. i
think it may have been the same problem you are having now only a tad
different.

Pat.

--- GoldED/2 2.50+