#Speedcache Plus
[Continued]
(continued from part one)
As mentioned earlier, if a user already has a hard disk cache, then adding
a new one seems an issue. We don't believe that the people running
SuperPCK, FAST!, Hyperdisk, PC Cache, and others should have to replace a
product that may work fine for them.
Your point about the RAMdrive working fine is something I would warn you
about. I also have been able to 'load' 12Meg. even 16Meg. Ramdrives on
some of our development machines. However, beta sites have reported to us
that these larger sizes caused system crashes under QEMM, 386MAX and
EMM386. Microsoft doesn't say, other than 4096 as a limit, whether there is
a problem, but I would still recommend a third party product which can be
verified before moving into an uncharted area such as this.
Lastly, as I have mentioned, in our tests internally (over the past few
weeks) against Speedcache+, Speedway dominated all motion video, gaming and
database CDROM apps using a third party RAMdisk called Nifty James. It's a
great public domain product (works in either EMS or XMS) . Both systems
were set to 8 Meg. Ramdisks and in all cases Speedway was 'slightly'
faster, not as you mentioned, slower. However, an important point here is
that by changing Speedway to hard disk caching using FAST! as the memory
cache, there was still an edge for Speedway, meaning that a user shouldn't
have to give away memory to the CDROM cache. Leave it in Windows where it
will help the most.
Maybe other users could join in, or better yet, a shoot-out may be in order
to determine the optimal CD ROM caching product. I'm all for it.
Reese.