PC Hacks

Hack #65. Speed Up DOS with SMARTDRV

You can add a boost to disk performance with the DOS SmartDrive program.

Caching or reading data from a hard drive and storing it in RAM is one method to speed up disk drive performance. Most disk drives have at least some RAM dedicated to buffering data between the disk and the data cable, some disk drive interface cards and chips provide data caching, and even DOS and Windows provide disk caching. DOS's own SmartDrive program, SMARTDRV.EXE, provides a tremendous performance boost for DOS systems. (If you install SMARTDRV for a Windows 95-98 system, Windows unloads SMARTDRV at startup. With or without SMARTDRV for DOS, Windows provides its own disk caching driver, VCACHE, to speed up disk performance [Hack #66] . For Windows Me and later, the device drivers and VCACHE provide disk caching.)

Loading SMARTDRV in DOS before running any DOS program or manually installing Windows will speed up the process tremendously.

SmartDrive provides a number of options for you to configure it, but as often as not, the simplest invocation is the best—it just works. SMARTDRV's command line can look pretty convoluted with all these options, as shown and listed below, but the final examples shown are more than adequate for most of us:

SMARTDRV [/X] [[drive[+|-]]...] [/U] [/C | /R] [/F | /N] [/L] 
[/V | /Q | /S] [InitCacheSize [WinCacheSize]] 
[/E:ElementSize] [/B:BufferSize]

The available parameters for SmartDrive are:

/X

Disable write-behind caching for all drives. ...