The PC vs. Mac floppy formatting speed test no one has done before
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- Finding an unused box of 3.5" double density diskettes at the thrift store gave me the idea for a PC vs. Mac speed comparison test that wasn't terribly relevant or useful back in 1996, and even less so today.
"wasn't terribly relevant or useful back in 1996, and even less so today"
There definitely is a market for a test like this.
I guess there's also one for doing so with two identical systems also? Or is that just me? (After all there are boot tests with various Windows versions, etc).
I need some speed tests done comparing different drive manufacturers....
Thank You. 😉
My PCs always took 0 time to format, because they came preformatted in the box. And my Mac could read DOS-formatted disks, so I rarely used the format command
I find it upsetting that the Mac provides no indication of progress.
In other words, one more thing which it was ahead of it's time.
It's the price of macs that I find upsetting.
@@typhoontim125 There's always the oddball *really* good value though, like the original 5K iMac that was about 40% cheaper than an equivalent PC and 5K display, and the new M1 Mac Mini is also proving to be quite the powerhouse for $700.
@@dregenius The real value used to be in how long a Mac stays a decent machine. MY 2013 MacBookAir is still perfectly usable for what it was designed for: A lightweight machine that handles simple every day tasks very well and can do some light editing if needed. Sadly the quality of Macs has dropped so much that this kind of metric can't be used anymore since newer computers break so quickly. I still think they last longer than pcs though.
A strange thing too, as older System Software versions at least gave some sort of other indicator besides than it was initializing the disk...
Years ago I worked in the IT department of an engineering company. Some of the managers had these Toshiba laptops. The hinge gave out on one of them and the screen quit working. Since the rest of the computer worked fine, I removed the screen and used it with a CRT monitor and dubbed it the halftop.
I've done this with a friend once, his laptop was way more modernt but it was almost the same thing you've described here (Halftop killed me hahahahahahaha)
That's reminding me of the classic misspelling of floppy disk, LOL.
Ah yes, the 'desktop', since it's confined to a desk setup now and can't be used on a lap.
@@Slay1337pl 😂
"remember when disks came in sleeves, they don't do that anymore" .. they might have to start making disks again for that to be a problem worth worrying about.
All I was thinking was, "what a waste of plastic!"
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 Yes. But it was kind of nice to have them individually wrapped, so you could take them out and use them without getting dust all over the shell ... which would eventually make its way into the drive, and the disk itself, and so on. Not as critical as the 5-1/4" sleeve, but still useful.
@@nickwallette6201 The waxy ('anti-static'?) paper which was not very easy to tear or damage; which was actually stronger than the disk itself!
They still make 3.5" HD disks.
@@johnathin0061892 [citation needed]
Last I heard, literally every manufacturer of floppy disks of any format had closed up shop.
(The last one was 3.5" microfloppy creator Sony, in 2010)
The whine made by the Mac during formatting with a close mic was surprisingly musical.
I was thinking the same! Especially when it was writing the directory and seeking back and forth across the disk. Now I'm expecting someone to make a music playing app that creates notes by reading different parts of the floppy. Where's @Foone when you need him?
It is, and remarkably fast at changing RPM.
@@KarlBaron They have been doing that for ages! Look up the Phantom of the Floppera video for instance. Or the Pawel Zadrozniak channel (anything with Floppotron in the title will also lead you there).
Don't forget @nstb !
Commodore 64 had a floppy drive that ran independently & could play music with its whine. Unfortunately that also knocked the head out of alignment, if done too often
next week's episode we will evaluate the performance of the BMW 735i against an Merces SLK based on the performance of the windscreen washer pump pressure and throughput.
That's something Hub Nut would do!
I love how the PC Windows copy is licensed to Steve Jobs 😂🤣😂
It's one of VWestlife's trademarks
he does it with every windows installation
Not every. I register some copies to William H. Gates III.
I was expecting the camera to pan to the Mac and show it registered to Gates of Hell.
So is my copy of FoxPro. Lol
The Mac method of making a second verification pass, while slower since you have to pay twice the seek times, is more reliable because it tests that the tracks can be located again. This would detect failures such as excessive slop in the disk or drive.
The PC floppy disk controller (FDC) and also the BIOS (when a 16bit floppy access is used, e.g. in DOS or in Win9x using a realmode driver), internally, allows the driver to modify the head load, unload and step rate times. DOS, upon boot-up, alters the "Diskette Parameter Table" vector at INT 1eh of the BIOS BDA to accomplish this. By changing these rates, you can either increase, or decrease the times it takes the FDC to wait upon the drive to be synced up with the stepper motor, causing faster (or slower) disk seek times. However, this can sacrifice the reliability of the disk operations.
Finally the real world benchmarks we've been looking for.
Excellent Review VWestlife Feeling nostalgic. I've used them 5.25 and 3.5 those were the days 🤣😊👍
I LOVE THE ending... "....what?!"
The three you mentioned never get clicks from me. With your videos, I interrupt anything but my wife to watch.
Nobody else including the ones mentioned will ever try to do these kind of stuffs. That’s why I subscribed to the channel. Great video 👏👏👏
Been watching your videos for years 💖 amazing content!
Take that, Linus!
…Sebastian
That formatting melody is delightful.
Talking of win95 I have the official MS floppy version OSR 2.1 on 26 floppies, still sealed to this day.
I wonder if any of them would have needed more than one pass? It could have been fine, but you never know.
Most of them may not work anymore, becuase of how old they are
@@CutieFakeKirby Esp. since they're 3.5" floppies. I have 5.25" floppies from the 80's that still can be read, But I have almost NO 3.5"s from the early 2000s that can! Floppy disk quality REALLY wen to shit by the end.
That variable speed thing the Mac has, it's just beautiful. I can imagine the unreal moment of bliss when the engineer who came up with that tested it successfully for the first time. Truly, a work of art.
Love your videos man, keep it up. :)
that would be the "integrated woz machine" or IWM floppy disk controller chip designed originally for the apple II by Woz himself.
I wonder why they didn’t use it for a 1.6MB HD disk. Maybe file sharing to PCs was more important than an extra 160kB?
@@timsenecal1727 ah, that explains a lot honestly. Woz is a magician.
@@kaitlyn__L I would imagine that it was a combination of things. The higher density had less margin for error, and the compatibility thing, but also the extra expense of having bespoke floppy drives instead of being able to use (at least most of) the same drive used in other platforms -- primarily, but not exclusively, the PC.
@@nickwallette6201 I can understand the first two, but it was already still a bespoke drive even though it had a 1.44 mode.
Interesting, it seems the Mac uses constant linear velocity as opposed to constant angular velocity, increasing the rotational speed as the head moves closer to the inner track. It also seems that the Mac goes from the outside towards the center when formatting but verifies in the opposite direction.
Interestingly the Powerbook uses a different encoding for 800K floppies that allowed (from what I remember) Apple to cram more data on DD disks, and when formatting the 1.44M disk it falls back to MFM encoding.
I think it's GCR that the Mac uses? I can't remember pretty well.
I always formatted my Mac floppies in DOS compatible mode, so I could read the files on a Windows PC as necessary. Yes it reduced capacity but not a huge amount
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@@Alexis_du_60 Right, 400 and 800k Mac disks are GCR with zoned-CAV. 1.44 MB is identical to PCs with constant-RPM MFM.
I mean, Linus is busy dropping things, Austin is getting fleshlights from Wish, and Marques is probably busy making videos about phones while using cinema-grade equipment. It's to be expected that none of them would do a video like this.
The one thing Linus should drop is his beard.
@@vwestlife Dropping his voice pitch may also help.
@@vwestlife I agree. That beard does not suit him one bit.
@@vwestlife He needs to bring back the old haircut. The rolled out of bed look is getting old.
Hey this was interesting to watch! I love comparisons of older tech and software! Thanks!
Everybody in the thrift store gangsta until Kevin arrives
This is the most consistent channel on the internet, the content is always superb regardless of the subject. Thanks!
@5:05 - RE the sound the drive is making - is the head reading from the center to the outer tracks and varying the speed like a CD ROM to maintain a constant unit/second head speed? That's what it sounds like.
Yes, it's doing that to pack more sectors into the outer tracks.
Constant Linear Velocity. Seems weird to me, the sector arrangement would imply the use of a CAV mechanism.
Except the heads travel from track 0 at the outside to track 79 as the innermost track, in a HD diskette, on a PC.
@@juanignacioaschura9437 CLV is probably too much work. This sounded like the Zoned version, so it is CAV in each stepped RPM zone
@@stephen1r2 yeah, exactly. The number of sectors per linear velocity isn’t exactly constant but it’s got much less variation than a PC drive.
Interesting comparison. 6:28 - Actually, the late IBM PS/2 machines could be ordered with electronic eject floppy drives (up to 3 of them!).
I've never heard of that. The later PS/2s did have 2.88 MB drives, but they still had manual pushbutton eject.
@@vwestlife I believe it was part of the C2 security standard (required by some government and military institutions), and it allowed you to lock the drive, among other things. The EE floppy drive itself is FRU P/N 92F0132, but it also needs a special bezel - something that's system-specific and rather hard to find.
@@GeckonCZ Thanks for the info. It appears that drive would fit into my PS/2 Model 56, but I've never seen one. IBM's PC DOS 6.x and higher have commands to eject and lock drives, but I thought that was only for CD-ROM drives.
@@vwestlifeThe later Models 56 SLC2/3 (type 9556) are supported, but your machine has the older 8556 SX planar iirc, so it may not work (the CPU was upgraded to the SLC3 level, but the BIOS and floppy subsystem remained the same).
Love the final take
#3:34 - When the PC was done, I audibly yelled "BAM!" like I'm some kind of digital Emeril. Weird.
LOL, Me too! 😂
Oh the memories of floppy disks😀 Takes me back to our first Dell PC from 1993😊
Amazing, I had no idea! That was pretty entertaining, love it! Also, the individual disk sleeves on the Polaroid disks are awesome!
I enjoyed playing this video at half speed. I love geeking out along with you during the day. :)
I love these tests.
I love Macs of all ages, so this was interesting. But, it was a real wake-up to how slow everything was back then. I restored a Mac SE HD/FD in 2014. It was rewarding and challenging. I even got it online! But, I just don't have the patience to do something like that again.
Only you can make me sit through a drive format video. Not the worst superpower I can think of.
I always wondered… but now we know for sure. Thanks! Now to try it with some Zip disks! 🤓
I'm sure a LS-120 drive would trounce both the PBook and the Toshiba's FDDs, provided you find a working one ;) supposedly they're a tad bit faster than a standard FDD.
Pretty cool test , yeah I remember the day when diskettes had induvial sleeves and I miss the chunky sounds of older computers had though.
I loved collecting floppy disks back in the day. They were like cassette tapes in the way that you could find some old prerecorded tapes and tape over their contents with your own music. I never threw them away because they were very easy to reuse over and over again. That all changed with CD burning which (looking back) was a very, very wasteful medium. So many people would burn such a small amount of data to a disc, use it once or twice, and then toss it. Such a waste of money.
Exactly! Back in the day, the online services used to offer free startup kits (ostensibly for distribution to family/friends/potential new customers), each one containing a (reusable) floppy disk. AOL had a limit of 10 kits ordered per customer. I found that Prodigy (Classic) had no such limit. I wrote a macro that would fill out their request form with my personal info and submit it, and I let the macro loop for about 10 minutes one day. A week later, a huge USPS crate full of kits arrived at my doorstep. I was set for free floppies for years after that. That sure was nice of them! 😁
2021: ewveryone: my nvme is rocketing the terabytes per second... vwestlife: which is faster formatting diskettes
Thanks for this - much more interesting than anything the BBC has to offer
That's cool. I remember having a similar satellite pro with WFWG. I loved how the power was built in, albeit at the expense of thicknesses.
I remember in the day there was a poke command you could give the COCO to dramatically speed up disc drive seeks.
What a fun video! Thanks for the memories. (For blue cross and blue shield, for a hip that finally healed). 100 cool points for knowing this reference without Google ...
The 105cs was the first laptop I had with windows. A good unit it was!
After a long, hard day watching some diskettes getting formatted feels usually relaxing.
Glad that's finally settled! Happy yer doing ok dude, what a year.
Excellent! I love the auto-eject on the Mac, never seen that before!
Neat, but failure-prone. And kind of annoying when it habitually spits out the disk on startup, making it a battle of wills to get it to boot from a floppy.
@@nickwallette6201 Weird, I never had this issue. It spit out the disk on shutdown, though. On startup it would only spit out a disk if you held down the mouse button. Agree though that it was failure prone and a mixed bag. The reason that it existed was that users couldn't be trusted to not eject the disk until the access light went out, and thus, could hose a disk through impatience.
@@dgpsf Hmm.. I've just started playing with earlier Macs in the last couple years, and seemed to always have to re-insert the disk to boot from it, but I wonder if I may be misremembering, or just attributed it to startup when I may have actually restarted from the prior owner's installation on HDD. I guess I could be wrong -- it's not something I've had to do a whole lot. Once you get the OS installed, that's that. :-)
Oh the potential for changing the speed of an eject and have the disk go shooting across the room; much like that of some slot loading drives; LOL.
The pitch and tone of that Mac floppy disk is amazing.
This more exciting and entertaining than NFL Thursday night football on NBC.
Verbatim was my go to brand during the days of diskettes with Imation/3M coming in close second. TDK was the worst. From 10pcs per pack, 5-7 would develop bad sectors early on.
The disks I used in the early 90s, DD disks on an old Mac Plus were all at least 3-7 years old and had been in heavy use for those years. A disk failure was super rare back then. By 2000 I was using HD floppies at school all the time and out of 30 kids in the class there were several disks going bad on a weekly basis. The quality had just gone to utter trash. And they were name brand Imation disks too.
I feel like everyone sighed a huge sigh of relief when the first affordable USB drives came around and held ~10 floppies worth of data for $8 or so and basically we all agreed when Windows 2000 and XP came out with mass storage drivers that floppies were dead to us.
There were ALWAYS bad sectors with disks; whether that be hard discs or floppies! It didn't just vary from company to company, but also (seemingly) the drive and when it was formatted! Once had a system disk error - 1.44M with - 1,457, 664 bytes space, 386, 560 bytes used by system, 4, 294, 509, 952 bytes in bad sectors, 1, 448, 448 bytes available on disk. (Needless to say it was a new disk and formatted using DOS). I decided not to use the disk until I'd tried to format it again; it refused to format as it was totally corrupted, so I used another computer and another disk. (This was at college). I'm not sure whether it was the disk or the drive at fault.
@@dgpsf CD/DVD writing varied too much back then too; too many 'drinks coasters' created, from all the brands; big and small; right at the very end of completion, or while verifying!
I formatted all the HD disks as DD. It eliminated all the problems (or just bought DD disks). I think HD was trying to squeeze more data than floppy technology could handle
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All I can say is I have formatted hundreds of diskettes in my time, and the speed seems to be more relevant to the individual diskette than the drive or OS. Some times you just get a crappy disk.
I worked in a computer store in the late 80s. I can tell you that when preformatted disks came out it made so many PC owners happy while of course Mac owners upset. But just imagine saving 10+ minutes of format time for each box (if you had an MSDOS machine).
They did eventually sell pre-formatted Mac disks, too.
The Mac vs windows comparison the world needs
Not irrelevant AT ALL, but interesting and nostalgic ♥
Mac about to drop some sick beat yo
Me watching this video carefully like I'm ever gonna use what I've learnt from it.
Gotta love that Microsoft software OS registered to Steve Jobs! Nice touch.
What a thriller. This should be in Olympics.
That was interesting, and I suspect I have a good notion why the Mac took longer for 1.44MB disks. Boils down to HFS(+) being a much more complex filesystem with higher overhead, and the fact that every disk a Mac sees gets GUI "droppings" written to it. Format first, add files after, then overhead.
So why is the 800k so much faster? The variable speed, which is probably usually faster than what the PC used, basically.
For those who might not know, Apple used the same encoding format and timings for writing its 1.44MB disks as the PC used so that software could move files between PC and Mac formatted floppies on either machine. Apple's older floppies were written using a different encoding mechanism called GCR and the variable speed mentioned in the video. THOSE disks a PC drive and controller basically can't read reliably.
Actually, Macs made at the end of the m68k era and all throughout the PowerPC era read 800k just fine, but are pretty widely reported to have trouble writing the old 4/800k disks, at least if those disks are going to be read back by other drives. The older drives had tighter timing tolerances than PC drives, and the new drives use mechanisms that were probably adapted from PC designs. Intercompatibility might've been higher when these drives were all new, but if you've got to WRITE 800k disks on a 1.44MB drive for other machines, you probably want the older Sony mechanisms.
(On my wishlist one of these days is a device to give me a way to connect an Apple 800k or early 1.44MB drive as a USB floppy drive with the ability to read/write all the GCR formats. I have no idea if the USB floppy protocol would even permit that offhand, but I'm sure that a suitably intelligent controller could read whatever you fed it, and format intelligently based on what it's being asked to write.)
this is exactly the content that I need in this website
Copying the contents of a full disk to the hard drive should have been the tie breaker :-P That was a lot of fun.
I love how the drive on the Mac seemed like it was seeking in a minor key. It was almost melodic.
"they don't do that anymore" -- OK! That was such an Andy Rooney-esque statement there. 😁
I’d say the Mac formatted the HD floppy faster. Verifying is not formatting even though it’s part of The Finder’s process. . Apple was conscious of the fact that floppies were the way you transported data from one computer to another back then, and this is why Macs had auto-eject drives and they verified the write, There was no danger of borking a disc because you ejected it while it was till spinning.
Macs back then could also read and write PC and Apple ][ ProDos floppies which was built-in since System 7. Sorry about the lack of a progress bar, we didn’t miss it and it wouldn’t have made initializing floppies any faster.
We need a head to head comparison between the sound of a floppy drive reading / writing vs a nice friendly loud purring cat on a lap. Both bring that warm fuzzy relaxing feeling, but which is the winner of the head to head?
Purring cat vs Macintosh 800K drive would be close. But the Macintosh 400K drive(s) wins the ASMR prize hands down.
Cool, takes me back.
oh i remember that auto eject floppy drive,, thought it was the coolest thing ever when i was a kid. just hearing it again sounds nostalgic.
Next episode: floppy disk vs compact disk
My first Laptop/Portable computer was a Toshiba 1200XE, which "went to college" with a family friend in the 1990's. My first Mac was an SE 4/40, which was upgraded to an SE/30 via eBay upgrade parts. My second Mac was a PowerBook 1400cs, which had been a Middle school computer. My second PC laptop is/was a Lenovo ThinkPad SL410. My third Mac was a G3 "Wallstreet PDQ" upgraded to 500Mhz. don't recall having to format DD or HD floppies in these units but this was an interesting trip into the past on the Wayback machine.
Superb content as per usual. :)
Perhaps Westlife could sample that Mac floppy drive for a new release.
That’s why I subscribe to this channel: important consumer advice.
Nice job starting both tests at the same time, I would've screwed that up.
You totally would. You're a legendary loser.
cool vid. my atari st 1040 can also format these dd disks as fast as the mac does, but it has no verifying so its little bit faster.
that is lovely !! it definitely brings me back ...
i like the little song the mac played while formatting the polaroid diskette.
This was depressingly interesting.
Those primaris 3.5 floppies I had a box of those i got on eBay a few years ago and I had about 4 that had bad sectors or they just stopped working all together. That's a crazy good test.
Did I just spent seven minutes watching someone format floppy disks? Yes, yes I did. ✅
The big difference in the floppy drives is that the Mac (and older Apple series) used Woz's GCR system on floppies, which is CLV like a CD. This variable rotational speed is what allows a Mac to have higher capacity than PCs on the same floppies (for example, 800k vs. 720k on DS/DD disks). With HD disks (aka SuperDrive) Apple decided to move to the PC's CAV-style (constant rotational speed, like a record or hard disk) MFM system, primarily in a bid for improved PC compatibility. So that's why they're the same 1.44MB on either a Mac or PC and no longer make the differing notes that the old GCR disks do.
As for software--eject floppies, Macs weren't the only computers to have those: Sun also used them in many of their workstations.
"they don't do that anymore" lol
Polaroid should have placed a white frame around their diskettes to align with their camera print film. Of course someone would have tried to insert one into a camera.
Amazing not how those old machines still work, but how those 3.5" disks are still working. In my experience, those were not very reliable, at least not the ones made near the end of the diskettes era. Even backup 3.5" diskettes used only once then stored in good conditions did not work one year later. I still have 5.25" diskettes working today, but it's hard to find a 3.5" diskette still working.
The floppy drive in the Toshiba is getting rather flakey. I often have to slap it around before it will read any disks. Otherwise the motor just spins like it's not connected to anything. Also the LCD backlight makes a terrible whine when I run it at full brightness.
To be fair I think the extra time the Mac took on the HD floppy was mounting the disk which the PC doesn't do until you click A: drive.
800k? Aww, adorable... :P
**880k Amiga Format Smug Mode Enabled**
But silliness aside, the variable speed on the apple drive is pretty interesting to hear, not heard anything like it before...
I remember there was a file system for the Amiga that you could install that allowed up to 960 KB on a DD disk.
2:04 3...2...1...Go!
Funky formatting beat
Great Video, great content as always.
Given how many times I did this on both my Powerbook and my PC in the 90s, I am surprised I never tried to compare the speed. Now I know!
Thanks for the video, Kevin.
I kind of find it remarkable that Apple kept that variable speed drive motor so late, you might have thought at some point they'd have given in and had the later SWIM controllers do variable data rates instead for 800k mode compatibility. That's how Commodore disk drives, even back in the late 1970's, similarly packed more sectors into the outer tracks. (And even at the time at the time when Apple started working on the Twiggy was obviously a much more sensible thing to do than speeding up and slowing the motor. Their 3.5" drives inherited the Twiggy madness, and all for about the same amount of data they could have stuck on the disk anyway by just using tighter MFM sector spacing. The one plus is that the overall higher rotational speed let them use about the same data rate as high density drives from day one, which is why the 800k format was faster. The original Sony version of the 3.5" disk drive actually rotated at 600 RPM instead of 300 RPM and was intended to be paired with 500kbs controllers for 8" disk drives, it was cut to 300 RPM when it went mainstream so they'd be compatible with standard density 5.25" controllers. )
The drive does make a lovely singing sound, though, gotta give it that.
If this Floppy might used on both Systems then I was quite ready for it.
You've also nicely demonstrated why the cheap USB floppy drives can't work with 800k Mac disks.
That is not bad, knowing that both are limited by the disc drive speeds and the media.
Now, You make me want to know the 5 1/4 relative disk format speed between a 5150 and and Apple II !
well that was a plot twist!
Brings back memories of jr. high, Good times ;)
VWestlife: "They don't come like that anymore."
Me: Do they even sell 3.5" diskettes anymore?
Yes.
@@vwestlife Huh, learn something new.
I haven't had to buy a diskette since the late 90s, and then I briefly switched to Zip disks after my college upgraded all their computers to work with them. I haven't been too worried about diskettes for a while.
Someone had a sense of humor naming that Powerbook's hard drive. I would do a 720k MFM format on the Mac just to make it a fair comparison. Apple's driver code for the 800k GCR mode is likely better optimized vs. the MFM code. The SWIM chip is really two disk controllers in one, a IWM for 400/800k GCR mode and a standard PC floppy controller for MFM stuff.
That is actually very interesting.
Very musical!
The variable speed sounds got me thinking about the origin of making music with floppy disk drives. With that PowerBook, you would have come up with the idea quite easily, not with a PC.
I don't think I ever formatted a disk in Windows 3.1 - I always did it in DOS
Now time the Mac formatting as MS-DOS.
I still remember the arrogance and unwillingness of the macfanboyz to work with the rest of the computing world when exchanging data on diskettes. Was a reason I kept OS/2 Warp running on one of my back office PCs well in the XP era.