I've made a better protocol for my parallel port application and can now
stream at 16kbyte/s when running it under nice -20.

My problem is that I have the program reading in 16k blocks, but the hard
drive only accessess every 96k-128k.  It gets off the 16kbyte/s sync about
once or never when playing from the hard drive, but on a ZIP drive it skips
almost every time it reads.  (Once every 6 - 20 seconds)

Is there a way to turn off the buffering that BSD does?

Grant