Since you have the memory to spare, yes - retrieving cached data in memory will always be faster than performing I/O.

RobDos wrote on 2023-01-07, 14:03:

So I'm building one of my systems, a 386 DX 40Mhz 20MB RAM with 512MB Compact flash. […]
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So I'm building one of my systems, a 386 DX 40Mhz 20MB RAM with 512MB Compact flash.

I'm pretty sure that the CF card is maxing out the ISA bus so is there any benefit to using Smart Drive?

I'm thinking about caching of the directories perhaps saving some of the read-write cycles on compact flash.

I'm curious of anyone's thoughts.

Smartdrive uses system RAM, so it is much faster than the ISA bus on a 386DX system ( unless ISA bus RAM expansion cards are being used)

20MB of RAM being quite a lot for a 386, I suggest you try to allocating 4 or 8 MB of cache with Smartdrv and runs some tests or benchmarks to see how much you stand to gain and decide based on that.

Also, read cycles do not wear out flash memory, only writes do (you likely know that already, but your phrasing about read-write cycles seemed a bit ambiguous to me).

SMARTDRV is used for caching contents into RAM, which would be technically faster (especially if compared to a normal HDD even if it has cache onboard) when reading them again afterwards as it isn't bottlenecked by IDE transfer speed or the ISA bus.

If stability matters, I suggest disabling the write caching with the /X command line switch. However, using this won't save any write cycles on the CF card.

BUFFERS in CONFIG.SYS should be decreased (10 is the ideal one) to ensure optimal usage with SMARTDRV.

Of course. Use smartdrv or pc-cache.

i habitually use xhdd & xdvd2 with a shared 64mb cache in a ssd system. i also load the cache above the 16mb boundary. i set my buffers to 11