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From: KUO@oregon.uoregon.edu (Shijong Kuo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Looking for a good disk cacher
Message-ID: <19082@oregon.uoregon.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 90 09:36:35 GMT
References: <10278@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Oregon
Lines: 38

In article <10278@shlump.nac.dec.com>, simon@hpspwr.enet.dec.com (Curiosier and curiosier...) writes:
>>>  The best that I've heard about, which has also been lauded by PC Magazine
>>>among others, is the PC Kwik Power-Pak from Multisoft. It include the disk
>>>cache, which has reported no incompatibilities among major PC programs, a
>>>print spooler, keyboard speedup, video speedup, and other DOS goodies.
> 
> PC TOOLS DELUXE v. 5.5 has PC-CACHE which is a subset of PC Kwik.  
> Beside my recommendation -- a long use with no problem so far on both 
> 286 and 386 machines, it is also highly praised by people at Quarterdeck 
> (I talked to them discussing some problems with DESQview), a couple of 
> other software houses, and PC Mag.
> 
> ---
> Leo Simon	simon@pwrvax.enet.dec.com
> 		--or-- ...!pwrvax!hpstek.enet.dec.com!simon
> 		--or-- simon%pwrvax.enet.dec@decwrl.dec.com
> 
> Who is not liberal when young, doesn't have a heart.
> Who is not conservative when old, doesn't have a brain.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Looking for a good disk cacher
 I apologize if this question has appeared before, but...  I'm searching for
a good disk cacher (or at least one that works on my 386).  I've tried many,
discache, cache2, qcache, lightning, smartdrv, etc, etc.  Some choke because
I run QEMM, some choke because they don't like my Mscribe 3085 (>1024 cyls),
and some just choke for no apparent reason.  Smartdrv was way at the top of
my list of caching greats, but it doesn't deal to well with the 3085.  Does
anyone know of a cacher that doesn't suffer from the above ailments, is fast,
and can use LIM or ext memory (I don't care which)?  Any help in steering me
in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
                                   Thanx in advance,
                                       scholes@snoopy.colorado.edu

I tried both smartdrv and multisoft's pckwik cache, pckwik has some nice features that caches disk write in addition to disk read access. I think it is similiar in concept to OS/2 HPFS's lazy write feature. For standalone applications that does lots of ra
ndom access to disk, pckwik is the very good, much better than smartdrv. But the write cache feature of pckwik automatically turns off when DV/QEMM is present. When I ran DV386 with pckwik the result is about the same ( or a bit slower) than smartdrv. Act
ua
lly smartdrv is faster for a cache hit situation. BTW I still uses smartdrv.sys loaded into high ram by qemm for both of my hard disk , one is 110MB toshiba with  830 cylinders and a second one microscienc 120MB with 1314 cylinders; also dmdrvr.bin is als
o loaded into high ram.

kuo@oregon.uoregon.edu