media toolbox and settings

[MichaelMerkel]

hi.

something i wonder really each time i use it:
in media toolbox, when editing a partition and the filesystem, there are the well known settings for buffer, max. transfer and mask.
what are the optimal settings?

there are selectors right to the input field which offer some preset values - like scsi-standard, ide-standard, ...
checking them they are all completely different to the settings i have filled in. but why?! i mean on what exactly these values depend?

i think this has to be made more easy for the end user. why entering such values at all? isn't the system able to just set them correct?

can someone please enlighten me?

thanks and regards...
michael

[kas1e]

i think this has to be made more easy for the end user. why entering such values at all? isn't the system able to just set them correct?

Have to agree with that. None of any new users want to worry about those settings, about which they should not worry at all on any other OS and partition utilitities. I think there should be something like "simply" mode by default, where everything just detects automatically (and even not showns for the user), and just a some small label where you can choice "adnvanced mode", where all the current stuff will be shown.

But by default, there should be only : choice of FS to use and partitioning gui.

And will be cool to just remove FFS from the OS4 at all (or at least make it only for "reading support"), but not for usage. All that validation and problems with speed which can FFS give, pretty boring already. There is SFS, JXFS and PFS for now. For new users its boring enough that he by default setup something (FFS), and just didn't not know how slow, problematic and retro that FS is it.

[ChrisH]

what are the optimal settings?

I believe that:
Maxtransfer should be 7FFFFFFF (FFFFFFF might also work but I have never dared try)
Mask should be FFFFFFFE (FFFFFFFC would also work, but seems unnecessary)

there are selectors right to the input field which offer some preset values - like scsi-standard, ide-standard, ...
checking them they are all completely different to the settings i have filled in. but why?!

As far as I can tell, they are historically ANCIENT settings from Classic Amiga times, and make no sense for AmigaOS4 (except possibly for AmigaOS4 Classic?).

Maxtransfer tells the maximum size of data that can be transfered in one "chunk", and I believe this is usually determined by what the underlying hardware supports and (sometimes) what the driver supports.

Mask determines the alignment of the memory used for the data transfer, and I believe this is determined by both what the hardware supports and (less often) what the driver supports. I'm not sure where 7FFFFFFF & 7FFFFFFC arise from, as they don't much any sense to me (they limit memory allocations to the lower 2GB of the 4GB address space - why???).


To be honest, I suspect that Maxtransfer & Mask are obsolete for AmigaOS4, and could probably be removed entirely. If they *aren't* obsolete yet, then ought to be, as you'd think OS4 should be better than a user at determining what the hardware & drivers support.

[xenic]

hi.
i think this has to be made more easy for the end user. why entering such values at all? isn't the system able to just set them correct?

I think most of the default settings are O.K. for current filesystems. The only problem I ever had was the "blocksize" , which defaulted to 1024 but must be changed to 512 for SFS. Maybe that's been fixed but I don't have any space on my drive to create a new partition to see what the default blocksize will be. Maybe someone else can check.

[MichaelMerkel]

hi.
i think this has to be made more easy for the end user. why entering such values at all? isn't the system able to just set them correct?

I think most of the default settings are O.K. for current filesystems.
...

but what ere "the" default settings? which are the "fitting" ones?
that's one of the problem i think. the defaults which are automatically set are not part of the selectors...

regards...
michael

[sundown]

And will be cool to just remove FFS from the OS4 at all (or at least make it only for "reading support"), but not for usage. All that validation and problems with speed which can FFS give, pretty boring already. There is SFS, JXFS and PFS for now. For new users its boring enough that he by default setup something (FFS), and just didn't not know how slow, problematic and retro that FS is it.

I use several programs that only work right on an FFS partition, main one is Transmission for torrents. Downloading videos to any other partition type crashes it for some strange reason I could never figure out, I need FFS.

[MichaelMerkel]

And will be cool to just remove FFS from the OS4 at all (or at least make it only for "reading support"), but not for usage. All that validation and problems with speed which can FFS give, pretty boring already. There is SFS, JXFS and PFS for now.

afaik ffs is the only fs which has advanced salvage support.
for sfs there exists some tools. for sfs2 i don't know and for jxfs nothing.
pfs is no supported fs.

as long as we don't get a 100% reliable fast ffs - well...

regards...
michael

[ancalimon]

Couldn't Media toolbox test the harddrive (maybe write some data and then try reading them) to learn which maxtransfer is correct and read the mask from the filesystem itself? (Especially on 4.1 Classic)

We had a problem about this when trying to install AmigaOS4.1 on my friend's amiga1200. We didn't know that we had to change the mask after selecting SFS. We couldn't decide what to choose for maxtransfer and mask.