#CD-ROM Cache Software
30 messages in this thread
Please, I need some feedback (good or bad) about using a CD-ROM cache
software utility. I have been looking at the Lightning package from
Lucid. Also, I believe Speedway does the same thing and there may be
others. So, is this just a second cache that will co-reside with
SMARTDRV, for example? How well does it integrate with memory
management, etc. Personally, I think PC configurations are getting
too complex but if you need this for a decent performance then I
guess that speaks for itself.
JOE
There is a new caching program about to be put on the market that is
incredible. I forget the company name that created it, but Symantec just
bought all of the marketing rights for it. I suspect it will flood the market
in a week or so. It is a disk caching program, which has extensions for
CD-ROM. In my tests it blew away CD-SPEEDWAY and every other caching program I
have used. We tested a beta copy while working on The New Bible Library
CD-ROM. The software is called SPEEDCAHE+. I highly recommend it.
I've been using SpeedCache+ for a couple months now and it's worked great.
It'll cache just about anything including CD-ROM drives (it replaces your
existing disk cache). Yes, Symantec bought the product about 3 months ago and
is selling it for $19 to registered owners of Norton Utilities. That's how I
got mine.
I've only found one problem with it. When caching floppy drives, it doesn't
always notice when a floppy's been changed in a drive when running under
Windows (no problems when running outside of Windows). Thus, I have to
temporarily disable floppy drive caching when I'm installing a multi-disk
Windows program.
Larry
how does it do with cdrom games like 7th Guest?
I've been using Speedcache+ as well and have 7th Guest. There is
essentially no speedup, as you'd expect, the first time you view a
scene, but as you move around, you often repeat a previous scene and
these movements are spead-up nicely. Seems to be a great program.
Only way I could see a better cache for a CD-ROM would be to have 650
Mb of RAM committed to the cache or have a program that could read
your mind and know which parts of the disc to cache ahead of time!
Sandy
Steve,
A CD-ROM cache is not going to help much with The 7th Guest unless you can
allocate 10meg+ of memory to the cache and even that would probably have little
effect. T7G is consistently sending a large volume of data from the CD-ROM to
the PC for its graphics effects and unless you bounce back and forth between
two locations, you'll see little benefit.
Larry
thanks for the response, Larry. I just finished the game last night. Pretty
hard towards the end! Never did solve the microscope puzzle. That was the only
one I cheated on. How about you?
You mentioned that you must dedicate 10meg+ of memory to the cache to get any
gain in performance when running 7th Guest. There is a CD-ROM cache, called
CacheAll, that takes caching one step beyond other CD-ROM cache programs.
CacheAll allows you to allocate memory and hard drive space for the cache.
Since your hard drive is still MUCH faster than the CD-ROM, you will still get
some big performance boosts even if you don't have the memory to dedicate to
the cache.
For example, you can setup a 2 mb RAM cache along with a 10mb or 15mb swap
file. When the RAM part of the cache fills up, it will push stuff onto the
hard drive. When you attempt to read information from the CD-ROM drive it will
first check the memory cache, then the swap file, then the CD-ROM drive. If
you want to download an evaluation version, it is available in the DOS,
Windows, OS/2 library with the filename CAV10D.ZIP.
Dave
David — Well, yes — but the experience of at least some of us here with the
evaluation copy of cacheall was pretty bad — lots of good ideas, but the major
effect was to hang my computer. Use Cacheall with extreme caution, and back up
your hard drive — just in case <g>
Craig
Craig,
If you give me your address, I will send you an updated version of CacheAll
(1.0f). A few people did report some problems of CacheAll hanging their
machine, but many people also found it to work very well. Of the machines that
did not "like" CacheAll very much, we were able to resolve all the problems.
Thanks,
Dave
Hi dave…I just downloaded CACHE ALL Ver 2.0e from the BBS, and installed it
on my 486 33mhz clone…and it finally worked, but when I tried to go to
windows…it just hung up forever…
How can I get the latest copy?
Thanks
David — Sure- I'll give it a try again.
Craig Henrikson
37 Herrick Ave.
Delmar, NY 12054
Thanks
Craig
David,
Would you also send me an updated version of CacheAll? As a
CD-Rom Player user (NEC MultiSpin External – CDR Series) and a sysop
I'll give it an evaluation and upload it to my board, The FileBase BBS!,
CA (818) 891-3458, and to other _larger_ bbs in the San Fernando Valley
(outside Los Angeles) area.
Send _any_ size diskette to:
Doyle Pitman
PO Box 8529
Universal City, CA 91608-0529
If you prefer to call the board… (up to 14,400 bps) leave
me a message by (from the Main Menu) hitting M for message section
and E for Enter a message… and send to 000 conference to DOYLE PITMAN.
We are using the latest version of WildCat! BBS software.
Thanks,
-=Doyle=-
P/S, We do, at present, have CAV10D.ZIP on the bbs.
Today I got a CD with a benchmark test on it and tried it both with & without
Cacheall. I got better results by not using Cacheall! I even had it set up like
it said to — cacheing the CD to HD and the HDs to RAM….. Oh well… Oh, I
also felt it took up too much space in my conventional RAM. Something like 56K!
Scott,
If you have EMS memory available, CacheAll will only take 21Kb. Could you let
me know the name of the CD with the benchmark software on it? I would like to
let our technical guys run some tests to see if we can reproduce this scenario.
We have tested with the MPC Wizard and found CacheAll to improve the speed by
over 2000%.
Also, the latest version of CacheAll, 1.0f, has just about doubled in speed.
Thanks,
Dave
No, I don't have any EMS mem available. Only have a total of 5 Meg RAM, use the
upper 4 Meg as extended. I run Windows alot, it likes extended better.
The CD is called: MegaDemo 1
from :
Profit Press
2956 N. Campbell Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85719
Info: (602) 577-9696
Fax: (602) 577-9624
Orders:(800) 843-7990
They have some shareware CD's and such. The ad was from –Windows Sources– and
they have a special prices now (how long – ?) You can get the MegaDemo disk
with CD test and abt 350 meg of Shareware/P.D. software for $14 + $6 S&H, OR at
the cheapest – buy their Mega CD-ROM1 CD for $25 total & get the Demo disk
free. That's what I did, was get 2 disks for $25. The demo CD has mostly
software that is on Mega CD_ROM1. They also have a MegaCD_ROM2 that is $35
total that's supposed to be mostly newer stuff. BTW, the Mega CD_ROM 1 was full
– 650 Meg.
The Test & benchmark is fairly good, only takes a few minutes. The MPC Wizard
said my data transfer rate was something like 58k/second, this other test gave
me 92k/second, which to me sounded more realistic. I had some other used CD_ROM
drives that I tested. A hitachi CDR-3700, with a 64k buffer, got the score of
154k/second data transfer rate. That sounds about par for a medium-priced
CD-ROM drive made in late 1991. So I now have the CDR-3700 in my machine and I
sold my CDR-3600 (32k Buffer). I wasn't able to run MPC wizard on the 3700, as
I had only borrowed the CD from a friend, and gave it back before I got the
faster drive.
Hope this gives you the info you were looking for!
Oh, BTW, I can upload a report on the benchmark test for my drive if you would
like to see what it prints out, if you'd like. It's just a small text file.
Scott
have you uploaded the newest version anywhere? I'd like to give it a try.
thanks. steve
David,
DF>> We have tested with the MPC Wizard and found CacheAll to improve
DF>> the speed by over 2000%.
I'm not aware of any shareware benchmark testing for CD-ROM
Players… with the exception of one I tried (that I can't recall the
name of that DIDN'T WORK!). Could you give me the name of one? Is MPC
Wizard a shareware program? If so, do you know were it is available
here on CIS, what the size is, and what the EXACT filename is?
Thanks again,
-=Doyle=-
Larry…How easy is it to disable devices like floppies? Can it be done on the
fly? Thanks.
-Larry
Larry,
Very easy to disable floppies and it can be done on the fly…I do it all the
time, especially in Windows.
Larry
Larry…Thanks for the info. I'm not really sure I need a CD cache since I
just bought a double speed drive. Be seeing you.
-Larry
Larry,
I own a double speed drive (the NEC CDR-74) and as fast as it is, it's still a
heck of a lot slower than a disk cache. I felt that Norton SpeedCache+ was a
terrific value at only $19.
LS
Larry…That's good to know. I'll put the cache on my wish list. Be seeing
you.
-Larry
I have tried both the CD Speedway program, and the Lightwin package. I can
honestly say that I have never hated 2 programs more than these cache programs.
The documentation absolutely sucks with cdspeedway. And both programs actually
slow things down if you are using cds that don't go back for the same
information. This is because the cache program will cache as much as it can to
the hard drive or ramdisk, and then use that info if it can. I know that when
I used either program with my Nautilus disks, it took about 1 minute more to
load the opening screen, and then after that about 25% longer for everthing
else. The exception to that was when I returned to the last item, it was right
there with little or no wait. So, now you have one opinion!
Interesting coments I knew this was not going to be a breeze. Couple
of things:
Regards the Norton cache, does the new one replace NCACHE? Does it
come packaged with the NU 7.0 utilities? Does it do anything special,
knowing that there is has a CD-ROM drive to cache, like CD Speedway
which claims to use your hard drive as a secondary cache when memory
gets full.
Steeve, I would be interested in how much memory you have since, to be
fair, that one variable could be key to the CD Speedway product to
work well. How about tweaking the software. Anything to explore
there?
Recently, I have tried the new Netroom 3 memory manager from Helix.
They have a very daring new technology that is far ahead, in theory,
from the competition. What they do is provide a technique called
'cloaking' where they run certain utilities in 32 bit protected mode
in extended memory. They run faster and one of the utilities is a
Hard and Floppy Disk cache. It really works great. They still have a
few kinks to work out and when release 3.1 hits the stores this
summer, I'm getting it based on the results of my tests. I have been
checking their forum here on CS and many users are demanding a CD-ROM
cache. That will complete the deal for me!!!
I had been using SpeedCache+ but when I added MS-DOS 6.0 it wouldn't work
anymore…so now I'm using NCACHE by Norton in Norton Utilities 7 but it
doesn't cache the CD-ROM…
How do we get an updated SpeedCache+ if symantic bought it?
John,
I am convinced that the new cloaked (32 bit code) disk cache from Helix
software's new Netroom 3 will support CD-ROMs in a future upgrade because the
thing is the fastest disk cache I've ever tried and their users are beating the
doors down for a CD-ROM cache inclusion. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. This
could be Nirvana!
Really…
Gosh, I don't think I have heard or seen this!
Let me know if it does do CD-ROMS's…
Thanks
Steve:
PMJI, but doesn't it make some sense that caching might work less well with a
product like Nautilus? In Nautilus, you are looking at a lot of relatively
short, but distinct pieces. In other programs, you have longer sequences of
data that the program can get ahead of, on the simple prediction that once you
start a sequence, you are likely to continue it.
Were you able to try either of these programs on other CDOMs of a different
type?
Best – Rich Bowers
yes, I did try the cd cace programs onc Coreldrw (cd based version), Multi
Media Beethoven, Bookshelf, as well as Nautilus and the new game 7th Guest. I
still hate the product! Wish they could improve them, so we could actually use
them!