I used it, particularly between 93-95 when I ran DOS 6.x; It was particularly useful for my dad's laptops which often had very scarce hard drive space. I don't think I used or needed it once I hit >500MH HD size. I got my first CD-ROM in 1994 and I guess that also helped alleviate hard drive issues for me. I never suffered a corruption myself but I do remember my dad's hard drive ending up having duplicates of every file and directory for some reason at some point and we had to format it..

I used it on my first pc, Epson EL2 (80286) with 4MB extended RAM and DOS 6.20 . I don't recall having any issues with it, although there was certainly a lot of negative talk.

The machine came with a 20MB drive, which was replaced by a 40MB drive. Doublespace was used on both.

Once I upgraded to a 386 with a 500MB drive, there was no longer a problem with space, so no need for compression tools.

On my current Windows 10 computer, the data drive has compression turned on. No idea how the technology works on it, but it's been 100% reliable.... so far.

Any ideas where to take my little project (Java impl of DriveSpace 3 but as mentioned easily convertible to other platforms)... some cool tools, a driver for an o/s etc? I just did it for fun but if there's some interesting uses that would be fun as well. Otherwise maybe I should create a github repo and focus on documenting the format etc. for historical preservation of the knowledge (doublespace/drivespace is mostly from the pre-internet age so there's not that much informaiton anyway)?

Someone mentioned the time 10+ years ago when SSD's were very pricey... it might have been a good time to have made my 'DoubleSpace revival' back then 😉

Did anyone used Stacker hardware accelerator ISA card? I've only once seen it on eBay.

Never knew it was a thing..

I had heard of the hardware compression cards. They seemed like an early 90s thing, by mid they'd died off. They only seemed attractive to power users who were reaching the limits of drive capacity you could cram into a single system, rather than ordinary users who wanted their 200MB to be a bit bigger.... in which case they would spend the money on more space. Trade-ins were more of a thing then with independent computer stores, for still useful CPU, RAM, HDD, you'd get as much as 2/3 of current retail on a trade in against faster/bigger.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-09-25, 10:50:

Never knew it was a thing..

Me too. Saw it on eBay by chance... this was like 5 years ago or even more. I somehow regret now not buying it. But it wasn't cheap and sold as is.

Actually, I bet they were relatively more popular in PS/2 use, given there were a limited number of HDD models. Also maybe for Compaq and other machines that only had a dozen drive types.

edit: Not sure of the perception back in the day, may have seemed less strange in tech circles because they had just seen RLL controllers improve the capacity of MFM drives by using a different encoding scheme.

Hi, I assume that these co-processor cards did really shine with those MFM/RLL HDDs that had a transfer rate below the maximum of the PC/XT bus.
Something like 200 KB/s (HDD) vs 1130 KB/s (PC/XT bus), roughly. That's a scenario when an compression card doesn't take away all the available bus bandwidth.

It would be great if someone could test the performance with the accelerator.

Something just came to mind of the last time I used drivespace "seriously". To set the scene it was just before the storage space/price and software bloat dam finally broke and we started to get ahead. I think maybe for desktop drives 20GB was top banana and they weren't treated like regular retail item by best buy etc yet. Late 90s sometime, but Win98 was out. Anyway, you could afford a decent sized drive for your main computer, but you still used everything over a gigabyte if you had it.... Me though, I had a budget of maybe $5 a month and was scrounging parts to make 2nd systems to goof around with , and to get ppl on internet, and for kids to use to keep them off the main machine, all that sort of thing. So gigabyte plus drives still held value, and although I'd got a few, they'd been deployed. At that time, I needed something to put a Win98 and office install on. What was available was a 250Mb, full height for 3.5 drive, Seagate I think, I would look it up but all I can get for Seagate at the moment on google is a face full of buy now spam for modern barracudas, iron wolfs, skywhatsedoesits. (Google is seriously messed this last month)

So this thing was ancient for a 250Mb, it must have been top of the line in 1990 maybe, the unbelievably huge drive for your 386. But it was kinda slow, okay, more than kinda. Same sort of performance that you'd expect from a 40MB, whereas late 250Mbs had same controllers as DMA mode 1-2 GB drives of the pentium era. Also, yah, it could have been bigger, install footprint of 98 was some 80MB then IIRC and office was 70MB minimum I think it was filling it up fast.. Anyway, so I drivespaced it from the get go, and when it was up and running it wasn't bad, got about 400Mb useable, and apparent speed improved to something more like a late 486 era drive. It actually remained pretty reliable and I think we stopped using that one in 2001ish, so 2 or 3 years service in that config. I think that drive remains "in stock" somewhere.