Mail Archives: opendos/1997/09/14/23:12:50
On Sun, 14 Sep 1997 23:34:40 RST ark AT mpak DOT convey DOT ru (-= ArkanoiD =-)
writes:
>nuqneH,
>
>In message <97Sep12.134216gmt+0100 DOT 11651 AT internet01 DOT amc DOT de>
>Christopher Croughton writes:
>>
>
>> > SMARTDRV can not be better or worse,it is complete _shit_.
>> > ..and delayed write with it is _dangerous_,it damages data!
>> > Use any pd cache instead.
>>
>> I've never found a PD cache with either good performance or
>reliable.
>
>I remember there are some.. btw Hyperdisk (not exactly PD,it is
>shareware)
>is lightning fast being compared with NWCACHE (and with smartdrive
>too..)
>
I took Hyperdisk for a test drive
and found it *slower* than
SmartDrive -- I wound up using an
old version of it on my XT systems,
but in that environment it is no
better than NWCACHE.
>btw NWCACHE slows down terribly on fragmented disks.
>..actually i don't care anymore - i have 4mb hardware chache on my IDE
>subsystem and i'm going to add 4 more for scsi..
>
This begins to make some sense now
that memory -- particularly 1 MB
SIMMs -- has become cheaper.
>> I've
>> never had any problems with delayed write and SMARTDRV, except that
>in old
>> versions it used to disable interrupts for far too long and clobbe
>comms.
>> Of course there's the problem if you switch off or reboot the
>machine, but
>> that's the problem with delayed write cache in general not with
>SMARTDRV
>> in particular.
>
>I've seen people who had problems with it all the time. I'm not sure
>it does even handle 3-finger salute correctly.
>
MS has a version that flushes
to disk whenever a DOS prompt
appears or control-ALT-DEL is
pressed -- MS COMMAND.COM and
recent versions of 4DOS support
this feature. I don't recall
the name of the distribution
ZIPfile offhand, but the version
is 5.0 and it is solid in my
experience on about eight
different systems.
Ah, here's the ZIPfile -- it's
PD0805.ZIP, dated June 9, 1993.
- Raw text -