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From: ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Extra ram vs. hard disk
Message-ID: <466@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 5-Aug-87 10:42:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocky.466
Posted: Wed Aug  5 10:42:44 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Aug-87 01:33:31 EDT
References: <18611@cca.CCA.COM>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Distribution: na
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 43

In article <18611@cca.CCA.COM> jack@cca.CCA.COM (Jack Orenstein) writes:
>What should I do the next time I have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket?
>That will buy either a 20 meg hard disk or 4 meg extra ram. (I've heard
>prices of $500 for 2 meg, and I extrapolated. If this isn't right,
>someone please correct me.)

2 Meg Ram boards can just be parasites and feed off the Amiga. 4 Meg boards,
on the other hand, are better off with their own power supplies, and thus
a bigger external unit. But in any case I think your extimate of $1000 is
probably right...

Actually you could probably create a wonderful Manx environment with
just (just? JUST?) a 2 Meg expansion --- Especially if you invest in
ASDG's Facc, the floppy cache. ($35 list, and well worth it.) With 512K
worth of buffers, you can just keep all your sources on disk instead of
ram: or vd0:. You can also precompile all the library files into a huge
file and thus avoid the need of bringing in all the library files into ram:.
With various commands and cc, emacs, ln, as, and make in vd0:, object files
and final executable in ram:, and source files on disk (but cached with facc),
you still work with about 1 - 1.5 Meg free and everything is real fast
(and the only disk access occurs when you make changes to a source and
write it out. This is a good thing! 8-) )

Of course, with facc you might wonder why not keep cc, ln, etc on disk
as well and just let facc cache them up. This works fine, except when I
crash the machine --- In vd0: they still survive and I avoid the reload times.
Also, because facc invalidates the cache on disk eject, and because I have
only 2 drives, this way I can use the internal drive to look at other disks
without decaching my sources and such.

Sometimes I notice I'm down to 512K and start to panic. Then I notice in
my Emacs buffers I am keeping the various autodoc files (all pretty huge),
various include files, and almost all my sources. 

Remember the Commodore with 7167 bytes free? Sometimes I would have 25
bytes left free when my program is running and would go crazy trying to
figure out what extra feature to add on...

Anyway, what's the final point? For $500 get a 2 Meg board, and find another
$250 and for $750 get a 20 Meg Supra drive (that is the mail order price...).
That way you have both!

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.s/71 -   WhRe