DOS ain't dead

Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 22.02.2024, 03:50

I used a TSR in DOS (years ago) that would simulate an LED activity light (probably found in 80xxx snippets).

DOS (before SmartDrv) had very primitive buffering via CONFIG.SYS's BUFFERS=n,m. (Tim Paterson [mirror] had a small writeup about some of that.)

While it's true that SSDs are fast, USB flash drives are slow. IIRC, they are allegedly 2x slower to read and 5x slower to write. So yes, modern OSes do cache writes to them, hence requiring an explicit eject command in order to flush pending data to disk (else you risk corruption). I use a bootable FreeDOS jump drive a lot, and I usually do most work on a 200 MB RAM disk for testing, then copy the finished programs to "hard disk" later.

Complete thread:

• Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - rr, 13.02.2024, 21:44 (Developers)
  • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - RayeR, 14.02.2024, 22:39
  • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - samwdpckr, 16.02.2024, 23:13
    • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - glennmcc, 17.02.2024, 22:48
      • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - samwdpckr, 18.02.2024, 19:02
        • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - glennmcc, 18.02.2024, 19:19
          • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - rr, 18.02.2024, 20:20
        • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - bretjohn, 19.02.2024, 16:40
          • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - Rugxulo, 22.02.2024, 03:50
            • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - Rugxulo, 21.03.2024, 07:22
    • Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines (by Julio Merino) - bretjohn, 18.02.2024, 16:09