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Gotek menu navigation gets super slow

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First post, by DOSDays

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Hi everyone,

Since there are several floppy drive posts at the moment, it got me thinking I should post this...
I have noticed that my Gotek's menu navigation with FlashFloppy really slows down to a painful level if I have a lot of disk images on the USB stick.

I tend to keep my floppy disk images on two of the really tiny Sandisk USB sticks with the little lip at the front - these are FAT32-formatted to 32 GB and contain about 150-200 images each. If you reduce the number of images to more like 100 the menu navigation is nice and fast (I have the dial on mine so switching between disks is very rapid compared to pressing the button a hundred times), but take it up to 150 images and when you get up that high in the index it takes about two seconds per disk to change between them.

Has anyone else noticed this?

My only solution right now is to use more USB sticks each that hold fewer images.

P.S. Upgrading the firmware to the latest FlashFloppy 3.38 doesn't help. It's my assumption that the Gotek's hardware just cannot cope with such a 'large' index of floppies.

Reply 1 of 3, by gen_angry

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I have about 2100 images on mine and it's still pretty speedy (aside from having to navigate through that many images/folders. Having a rotary helps). My stick is a tiny USB2 verbatim 16g.

May be a weird issue with your specific board and the sticks you're using, try a different brand?

Reply 2 of 3, by DOSDays

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That's a good call gen_angry - I seem to recall only ever using this one brand/size of USB stick, so will give several others a shot and report back.

Reply 3 of 3, by DOSDays

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OK, so the slow tiny SanDisk is the Ultra Fit USB 3.1, claimed to have speeds up to 130 MB/s read.
Using the rotary knob on the Gotek, it's fine until around image #213 (out of 264 stored on the stick) when it slows down. The slowdown remains the same until it scrolls through to image #1 again, when its fast again.

I copied 384 image files to a Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 32 GB, and it runs perfectly no matter where you are in the index.

Problem solved!

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