86. Formatted disc speed ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can get faster response times from your disc just by using the right formatting program. Each floppy has a small index hole near the large centre hole. Some formatters put sector 0 after the index hole on every track. The effect of this is that each time the head steps from one track to the next, it misses the start of sector 0, causing a delay until the index hole comes round again. The better formatters provide an offset of several sectors between each track to allow the head to settle after stepping. The following program was used to compare different formatters. 10 *CAT Return Head to Track 0 and spin disc. 20 TIME=0 30 *VERIFY Must have Watford DFS or Disc Doctor. 40 PRINT TIME The Watford DFS formatter is one of the slowest, somewhat surprisingly being beaten by a BASIC program available free on Micronet. Disc Doctor has a very fast formatter, and the Cumana program is also good. Further improvements in speed can be achieved by moving frequently accessed small files to the outer edge of the disc, i.e. nearer to the catalogue. The prime candidates for this treatment are the !BOOT and MENU files. These files are usually added as an afterthought when the disc is complete, thus placing them near the centre of the disc. This results in much tracking noise, wasted time and head wear each time the disc is booted. Far better to put dummy !BOOT and MENU files on the disc immediately after formatting it, ensuring that these vital files reside (mostly) on track 0. (One way to save a dummy file is to use *SAVE !BOOT 0 1, but this only reserves one sector of 256 bytes, but you can use *SAVE MENU 0 n00, where n is the number of sectors to be reserved.) NB: This was written before the Acorn 1770 DFS was released; this does of course support the *VERIFY command.