25 May
2000
25 May
'00
11 a.m.
I use pcdos 6.3 and 7.0. much better than msdos i
think, and i prefer the
editor. how in the world can one realise 15% performance increase running
disk compression? logic would indicate a degradation since you are running an
extra task to compress the hard drive not to mention less memory space in the
UMBs to load the compression driver high. i do not use any sort of disk
compression and never recommend it to anyone. i supported end users, and
there were too many times when users compressed their hard drives, and ended
up hosing them. only option to them was fdisk and reinstall. K.I.S.S.
As usual, with disk compression YMMV. It depends upon where the bottleneck
is. The first system I used compressed volumes on (a long time back) had
an XT bus running at half the processor speed that was lucky to get 250 kBps
from the HD drives. It was so slow that the best
interleave was 1 because
it took an entire rotation to transfer one sector from the
controller to
memory. Compression besically doubled the I/O speed. A good (not smartdrive)
write cache (with write delay set to the max) worked wonders as well.
Even on my 386 machine compression turned out to be a performance boost in
DOS and Windows. In the end, I don't think I lost any data to failure of a
compressed drive. Stacker was pretty robust.
Eric