chrisNova777 wrote:so the tekram card.. intelligently reads data from your drive + keeps it "at the ready" in case u may need it? so it loads everything instantly? that sounds pretty close to the idea behind the "fusion" drive unleashed by apple in the last few years
Hmm....Apple's fusion drive was an SSD (flash storage) attached to a hard disk. So similar idea, though the Tekram controller has memory onboard for caching recently used data and its only maximum of 16MB (though back then, 16MB of cache was almost unheard of) versus 128GB of apple's Fusion drive.
A lot of RAID cards nowadays have onboard cache, or at least a slot to add memory.
It does make a huge difference. I tested my semi-working Tekram card out with 16mb when loading Doom II. First time, it took my 486DX2-66 about 4-5 seconds load. Second time (reading from cache) the time was about 2 seconds.
I really want to get my Tekram card up and running and see how well it works with Ultima 7 when running without DOS's Smartdrv (disk caching software) and a few other games that constantly load data from the hard disk.
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