the best time to do win32 development is when microsoft's entire cloud has shit the bed
gotta pull out my visual studio 6 MSDN CD because the online stuff keeps timing out
and lets see if the internet archive has WinObj, because sysinternals is not responding

I'm just trying to read sectors off a floppy drive that's not mounted because it doesn't have a FAT12 filesystem!

surely this is an everyday occurrence in windows 11, why is this so hard?

ah-ha!

r"\\.\GLOBALROOT\Device\Floppy0"

I'm benchmarking how long it takes to read a floppy disk, for my video player. test one is calling read(512) 2880 times
305 seconds, that's five minutes.
My video is 252s/floppy, so that's sub-realtime. NOT GOOD
½kb: 305s
1kb: 161s
2kb: 89s
4kb: 58s
8kb: 42s
16kb: 34s
32kb: 30s
64kb: 28s
128kb: 28s
256kb: 28s
512kb: 28s
1024kb: 28s
1440kb: 28s
That's speeds on a Teac FD-05PUW

a reasonable thing to do would be to adjust my video bitrate so that it stores something like 45-60s instead of 252s, since I can read one disk every 28s.

this'd get me MAXIMUM VIDEO QUALITY at the expense of increasing the video size from 12 floppies to 51-68

Greaseweazle + TEAC FD-235HF:

default settings: 97s
--revs 1: 66s

that makes sense. The USB Teac is a 2X drive, so it's running the disk at 600 RPM instead of the intended 300 RPM, and it gets roughly twice the speed.
@foone i did not realize there were 2x floppy drives!!

@whitequark 2x and 4x!

and I've heard of custom designed models for specialist applications that went up to 32x (I believe it had 4 separate floppy heads, arranged at 90 degree intervals)

@foone @whitequark Can't you also (not on the standard interface) use both heads simultaneously to get a doubling nearly for free?