[Info-vax] Valid disk types for SIMH?

[JF Mezei]

Paul Sture wrote:

> FWIW doing an INIT /ERASE on a 30GB disk took about 1 hour 10 minutes on 
> my 1.5 GHZ PowerBook. I might play with some FDL file placement to speed 
> things up here :-)


is it really necesssary ?

If the underlying file system is smart enough to give you a brand
spanking "fresh off the press" block filled with steaming zeros topped
with whipped cream whenever you request a block that has not yet been
allocated, wouldn't the emulated VAX still see a 30 gig drive  where any
unwritten blocks are filled with 0s, no matter where they might be ?


OS-X brags about fragmentation not being an issue, and I have no idea
how it does this.  From a legacy point of view, it would seem that
allocating your 30 gig drive in one shot would make more sense from a
performance point of view since it is more chances oif it being
contiguous. Doing on-demand allocation may work, but can it still yield
efficiently organised contiguous allocations ?