Windows floppy disks read faster in Panther

[jimthorn]

I know this doesn't mean much to most Mac users, but I discovered something interesting tonight. Panther has much better floppy drivers built-in than 10.1/10.2 did. I have an old Sony Mavica FD90 camera, which writes to floppy disks instead of memory sticks, and of course writes in Windows format. When I used to download the images to my Mac via a USB floppy drive, it would take as long as ten minutes just to copy one 1.4MB floppy. :eek: This was an issue with OS X. Reading and writing Mac floppies was quick, but Windows disks were painfully slow. But today I tried my floppy drive in Panther and surprise! it copied off the whole disk in about 30 seconds. So for me and the other three people out there who read Windows floppies on their Mac: Thanks, Apple!

[york2600]

Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to be a jerk at all. When you say it writes in Windows format you really mean FAT format. It's more an old DOS thing. Again. I'm not trying to be a jerk. Just trying to let you know the real name.

[iEric]

Originally posted by jimthorn
I know this doesn't mean much to most Mac users, but I discovered something interesting tonight. Panther has much better floppy drivers built-in than 10.1/10.2 did. I have an old Sony Mavica FD90 camera, which writes to floppy disks instead of memory sticks, and of course writes in Windows format. When I used to download the images to my Mac via a USB floppy drive, it would take as long as ten minutes just to copy one 1.4MB floppy. :eek: This was an issue with OS X. Reading and writing Mac floppies was quick, but Windows disks were painfully slow. But today I tried my floppy drive in Panther and surprise! it copied off the whole disk in about 30 seconds. So for me and the other three people out there who read Windows floppies on their Mac: Thanks, Apple!

Wow thats really wierd...What would they have to change to make floppy disk reading faster?! Cool. But then again..Who uses FLOPPY? :rolleyes: j/k

[revenuee]

Originally posted by iEric
Wow thats really wierd...What would they have to change to make floppy disk reading faster?! Cool. But then again..Who uses FLOPPY? :rolleyes: j/k

I miss the days of when i could store all the files i was working on in a single floppy disk, now sometimes a CD-RW isn't enough .... sigh


edit: hey look at that, 500 posts :D

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by york2600
Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to be a jerk at all. When you say it writes in Windows format you really mean FAT format. It's more an old DOS thing. Again. I'm not trying to be a jerk. Just trying to let you know the real name.

Yeah, I know, but I was just trying to describe it in the general way everybody talks about it.

Originally posted by iEric
Who uses FLOPPY? :rolleyes: j/k

Believe me, if I didn't still have that old camera, I wouldn't touch 'em either. I should be getting a nifty new Canon SD10 pretty soon and then I can ditch the disks and the drive. But in the meantime, I figured somebody out there would care that Windows (*ahem*, FAT format) floppies read faster in OS X.

[revenuee]

Originally posted by jimthorn
Yeah, I know, but I was just trying to describe it in the general way everybody talks about it.



Believe me, if I didn't still have that old camera, I wouldn't touch 'em either. I should be getting a nifty new Canon SD10 pretty soon and then I can ditch the disks and the drive. But in the meantime, I figured somebody out there would care that Windows (*ahem*, FAT format) floppies read faster in OS X.

SD10 eh? ya it looks pretty sharp...
nice and small and high rez ... size wise it's not much bigger then my DC20 and thats a small camera

[Powerbook G5]

I've never read a PC floppy in OS X but with OS 9 they were pretty quick and PC formatted Zip disks seem reasonably fast with OS X, too.

[iShater]

I use a USB floppy drive and PC floppies all the time to move files to work or for my wife for her papers (our second, and third, and forth computers are PCs). And it is true, it take quite a looooooooong time to copy files to floppies under Jaguar.

Of course I don't have Panther yet, so I won't see the speed increase, but glad to know it is there.

[iJon]

i wonder if pc formatted ipods and firewire drives work just as quickly. if so i can reformat my firewire hard drive and delete macdrive 5 and just use it between my mac. ill have to give it a try.

iJon

[ITR 81]

I have a mavica as well thats just over 3 yrs old. It was pretty nice on Win98 but moving files via floppy was a chore. I know what he's talking about when it takes like 10 mins to dump a floppy formatted on wintel machine. I haven't tried it Panther yet but I'm glad to hear it's faster because I still use floppies every now and then.

[jimthorn]

Originally posted by iJon
i wonder if pc formatted ipods and firewire drives work just as quickly. if so i can reformat my firewire hard drive and delete macdrive 5 and just use it between my mac. ill have to give it a try.

They should work fine. What I'm talking about here was a known issue with PC/FAT/Windows floppy disks that affected Mac OS X. OS 9 always worked fine with them. It was simply poor floppy implementation on OS X, which of course most people didn't care about, since floppy drives haven't been standard on Macs since the late '90s. The few of us Mavica FD camera users are probably the only unlucky ones that had to deal with the problem. Kudos to Apple for fixing it at last anyway.

[Nermal]

I thought OS X didn't support floppies? Or does it only support USB floppies and not internal ones?

[alset]

Originally posted by jimthorn
The few of us Mavica FD camera users are probably the only unlucky ones that had to deal with the problem.

Actually, I had to invest in a floppy drive so I could load OS updates for a synth. Damn thing can't update via MIDI.

I agree that floppy disks are much faster in Panther. I wouldn't have noticed this for months, had you not given me a reason to check.

Dan

[Powerbook G5]

The only floppy drive I've ever used on a Mac was the Superdisk drivebay module for my Lombard series G3 PowerBook, which worked quite well with OS 9, but since it is a drivebay device, I have no way of using it or my superdisks with OS X to check.