FASTDISK

This program allows 25% improvement in disk speed. It achieves this by initalising a disk in a different way (see below), and this means the extra speed is possible without first loading a special program, and is available from any software, not just basic.

When this program is loaded, it will display a warning message, then wait for you to insert the disk to be initalised, and to hit <RETURN>. As with INIT, the program will take about one and a half miniutes, and will destroy the previous content of the disk (if any). When it has fininshed, the "Insert disk, hit <RETURN>" message will reappear. If you want, another disk can be initailised, but otherwise type <BREAK> will return you to Basic.


HOW IT WORKS

On each trcak of a disk, DOS's INIT command will arrange the sectors in this order.


0,11,6,1,12,7,2,13,8,3,14,9,4,15,10,5 (see the pattern?)

There is a gap of two sectors between any two numerically consecutive sectors. Some interleaving is necessary, to give time for each sector to be processed, but two sectors is much longer than necessary. FASTDISK initialises the disk with only one extra sector between two consecutive ones, using this arrangement:

0,8,1,9,2,10,3,11,4,12,5,13,6,14,7,15.

The result is that DOS spends much less time waiting for each sector to come up.