Future Drive Accelerator
Future Drive Accelerator is a disk-cache program.
A cache buffers all data which is written or read from the drive (hard disks, floppy disks, Compact-Disk, removable disk, ZIP...).
If requested data is already in the cache, it doesn't need to be loaded from the slow disk.
So far nothing new!
Memory is, as we all know, always short. So you better think twice before you give it to programs. No matter how you set it up, you can never make it suitable for all programs. One program runs (thanks to the cache) faster than ever before, another one stops working (due to the lack of RAM).
With all other cache programs, you had to adjust the memory usage.
Of course, the more memory a cache can use, the faster it will work.
So with old cache programs the memory usage had been set quite high,
but because other programs stopped working this was stopped rather quickly.
Now the cache is commonly set to an average size, so that all "memory-eating"
programs run.
Or you always had to change the cache-size manually to fit the current situation.
But this is not a very satisfactory solution. And this is where
Future Drive Accelerator comes in.
The whole free memory, whose size is changing all
the time, is used as cache.
With this technique, an Amiga with a 68030 50Mhz processor and 16
MByte FastMemory (Blizzard IV) averages a factor 4 speed up. See section 3. What speed improvements can be achieved with Future Drive Accelerator?.
Write accesses are buffered, and later, while writing back to the drive, the head is moved from the highest to the lowest address.
Another improvement is built-in for people who use exchangable media like disks, CDs, MagnetOptical-disks and ZIPs. When inserting the media again, the still filled cache is used. The media doesn't need to be accessed again.
Who used a lot of dos-buffers?
(1)
for the file system, you can now even save this memory.
Not to mention that you help protecting the environment.
The motor and the electronics of the drive is used less and thus,
energy is saved.
=> the nuclear power plants can be shutted down earlier.
You should also keep in mind that the hardware wears out less.
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