Why is floppy access so slow?
faq / This problem IS fixed in more recent kernels, but I’ll put the original answer in the FAQ because it’s interesting FreeDOS history: From Pat Villani: It’s actually very simple. I originally wrote the code as part of a real-time os. That os had disk drivers that worked with dma and were multitasking. So, I took advantage of it and only did all my reads and writes out of the disk buffers. The next sector was always set for read-ahead so that while I was reading or writing the current sector, the next one was filling the buffer. For the bios drivers, I need to specifically fetch each sector and wait until it finishes. This is too slow to read the next sequential sector so each sector read waits for another revolution of the disk. Since this is tens of millisconds, it is very slow. ———– Additional comments: FreeDOS disk drivers eric / The FreeDOS disk drivers have changed a lot around version 2025/2026, so I think this is no longer a problem. Now, when you read larger amounts
