In the meantime, I've found the real reason (no, my drive is perfectly OK :-)
The DOS-fs does no read-ahead on the FAT. So whenever you read a cluster of
a file that's located in a yet unread sector of the FAT, the head has to
move to track 0 to read the next part of the FAT.
I added a really ugly hack that always causes the whole FAT to be read on
the first access (if the FAT is small enough, i.e. on floppies). This keeps
the whole FAT in the buffer cache and now I can read a complete disk
without any unnecessary seeks. But this is definitely not the right
solution, because other FSs (ext2, for example) seem to have similar
problems.
Martin
-- /* Martin Buck E-Mail: martin-2.buck@student.uni-ulm.de */ /* Student of electrical engineering WWW: http://www.uni-ulm.de/~s_mbuck1/ */ /* University of Ulm, Germany Snail-Mail: Paukengasse 2, 89077 Ulm, Germany */ #include <disclaimer.h> /* PGP Key available MIME-Mail welcome */