🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bx9ME2.H40@voder.nsc.com>, pad@galaxy.nsc.com (Paul Denny x8349) writes:
> I am looking into assembling a 486 machine and my
> research so far has raised a few questions which I
> was hoping may be resolvable through the net.
> 
> As a starter I note that caching disc controllers
> are supposed to increase the speed of disc intensive
> applications but a salesman I spoke to 8^) claimed
> that these are flakey designs as a single bad bit
> can propogate through your data and corrupt it. He
> suggested additional system RAM and partition it
> in DOS to have a large cache area. Can anyone verify
> or debunk this and provide an explanation?
> 
> Many thanks - Paul

I use a hardware cache in my IDE hard drive with no problems. However, the 
Computer Shopper ran tests comparing various caching controllers with 
software (RAM) caches and their surprising results were that in most cases 
the software caches were faster! When they compared the relativey high 
cost of a caching controller with the (then) low cost of RAM it made a 
pretty good argument for spending less and getting more.

			Allen Mulvey
			mulvey@blurt.oswego.edu