becap@cs.mcgill.ca (Brian CAPSON) (03/01/91)
I've tried Hyperdisk, and didn't like it. It was much better than Smartdrive, thats for sure, but I found that it crashed me out of windows a few times, and the cached writes didn't work very well- If I removed a floppy that it was postponing writing to, it would dump me unceremoniously out of windows. Since then I've been using Super PCKwik disk cache, and WOULDN'T TURN ON MY COMPUTER WITHOUT IT! It'll plop into any kind of memory you have, QEMM can load the driver high so you use almost no conventional, and it has the most complete set of initialization options I've seen. It's measure option reports a consistant hit rate of about 95%, and on file copies it returns my DOS prompt instantaneously- it's write cacheing is flawless. In windows it runs beautifully, you can actually see the difference. I can usually run Excel or WinWord, exit them, do a few things, then run them again, and the hard disk isn't even touched! Now that's speed. To me it's well worth giving up the flexibility of the dynamic cache sizing availible in smartdrive. I have mine set to 1.5 megs (rather arbitrarily, I'm sure the results wouldn't differ _that_ much with a 1 meg cache like is recommended for smartdrive. The only drawback is that PCKwik is a commercial product, but it's not too expensive and worth the price. - Brian Capson McGill University School of Computer Science Montreal, Quebec becap@bart.cs.mcgill.ca