🚀 go-pugleaf

jsteele@insyte.com (John Steele) writes:

 >BJSpace@ix.netcom.com (B. E. Johnson) writes:
 >
 >>In <674529809wnr@rosebery.demon.co.uk> Brian@rosebery.demon.co.uk (Brian 
 >>Sheehan) writes: 
 >
 >>>I'm currently trying to decide to establish my windows 3.11 
 >>>setup with either 32 bit file and disk acccess enabled or 
 >>>to use the utility Rocket.

You can use 32 bit file access with Drive Rocket just fine.

 >>>                           Under DOS I'm certainly getting 
 >>>better performance but under Windows the performance seems
 >>>almost identical (I'm using the Western Digital driver for 
 >>>my two hard disks) [...]

This is not surprising, as the WD driver does the same thing for Windows
that Rocket does for DOS, that is, enabling block transfers. It is  very
unfortunate that the WD driver won't initialize with Rocket present.

 >>My jury is still out on DR but the 'feel' you get that the machine is 
 >>faster with 32-bit enabled is real and has little to do with the 
 >>transfer rate. What is making the big difference is that with standard 
 >>Windows the Windows system drops repeatedly into real mode to do disk 
 >>transfers and then back up into 386 enhanced after each file is read in. 
 >[snip]

This  is  certainly  true.  Normally,  Rocket compensates this effect by
making your disk faster in the first place, but if  you  compare  it  to
Windows  with  WD  driver,  this advantage is negated because the latter
does the same magic Rocket does.

 >The other factor is that as I recall, vcache is a file cache as opposed to 
 >a track cache -- as a result all, or a significant portion, of a file a read 
 >in to the cache so its available more readily. the track cache approach reads 
 >one or more tracks in, which may or maynot contain the data needed next.

But there is no reason to wave VCACHE bye-bye when you use Rocket.

 - Peter Herweijer
   pieterh@sci.kun.nl