> and 95 (surpisingly) ran faster with smartdrv preloaded. 95’s default cache for some reason was worse than smartdrv
My (weak) guess is that you "32 bit disk access" and "32 bit file access" wasn't active then, i.e. Windows 95 did not use its native 32 bit disk drivers, but 16 bit BIOS access. I have a hard time seeing how Smartdrv could have done anything otherwise, unless it really had some tight integration with 32 bit Windows (which would be very surprising, it's a 16 bit TSR first and foremost).
But yeah, overall, I agree, it's surprising what even a tiny cache does. If you just manage to eliminate the seek times to the root directory for pretty much every single access to a new file, that can probably do a lot already. Especially in the days before "native command queuing", where the HD would try to reorder disk accesses to find a better (physical!) head seek path across the platter. Later HDs had some cache on board.
My (weak) guess is that you "32 bit disk access" and "32 bit file access" wasn't active then, i.e. Windows 95 did not use its native 32 bit disk drivers, but 16 bit BIOS access. I have a hard time seeing how Smartdrv could have done anything otherwise, unless it really had some tight integration with 32 bit Windows (which would be very surprising, it's a 16 bit TSR first and foremost).
But yeah, overall, I agree, it's surprising what even a tiny cache does. If you just manage to eliminate the seek times to the root directory for pretty much every single access to a new file, that can probably do a lot already. Especially in the days before "native command queuing", where the HD would try to reorder disk accesses to find a better (physical!) head seek path across the platter. Later HDs had some cache on board.