The Saturday 2003-11-15 at 21:51 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
file system drivers to make better decisions. In contrast, the Windows file systems are not buffered (in the sense of kernel buffers).
There are buffers in Dos, and it can do some read ahead, but certainly not to the extent of linux.
There is a historical reason for this. The Windows file systems were designed for floppy disk in an MS-DOS environment. The Unix and Linux file systems are designed for performance in a hard disk server environment. The advantage of the Windows unbuffered system is that in the event of a crash or if the system is turned off, the theory is that
There is another historical reason. MsDos was designed for a CPU with a maximum memory space of 1 megabyte (only 640K of them as ram) - in fact, the first PCs had about 64 Kbytes. There is no much place there for big disk buffers, nor probably for the extra coding needed :-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson