Re: Jeff Blakeney's Interesting SprintDisk card...

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 23:41:05 GMT, labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas
Enoreth) wrote:

>In article <37cbeb41.6304313@news>, CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney) wrote:
>> When I got this box with the Laser 128s I got last year, it had a
>> Sider hard drive controller and a SprintDisk card in it.  The
>> SprintDisk card is quite interesting as well but that would be a
>> subject for another thread.  :)
>
>:P I'm interested...never heard of it before, so I wondered what it is/does.

heh

Well, the SprintDisk card was made by a company called AST Research
Inc. and is a 1 MB regular slot RAM card that is compatible with
Apple's memory card.  In fact it has fixed some of the problems that
the Apple card has.

It has a connector for adding a piggy-back card to expand the memory
to 2 MB (I don't have one of these, though).

It will be automatically recognized and used by applications such as
AppleWorks v1.3 and up and will also be automatically recognized as a
RAM disk.  It will even automatically format itself for ProDOS or
Pascal v1.3 when you boot into one of these operating systems.  Under
DOS 3.3 you need to set it up manually but it does give you up to two
400k DOS 3.3 volumes depending on how much memory is installed on the
card.

Even when a program like AppleWorks sees the memory and uses it to
expand the desktop size it has available, you can still use the card
as a RAM disk.  Your desktop size will decrease as you add files to
the RAM disk, however.

If you don't need the extra memory or a RAM disk, you can also use the
memory as a disk cache under ProDOS.  It can automatically cache up to
14 drives of any size so that subsequent reads will be read from RAM
instead of from disk.  This speeds up disk reads.  Writes are sent
directly to the disk.

The software included is even smart enough to allow you to have more
than one of these cards installed so you can use one for disk cacheing
and the other for RAM expansion/RAM disk.

Now if only I had the pinout of the piggy back connector so I could
expand this card.  I'd also would like to see a GS/OS cache driver
written for it.

Does that satisfy your curiosity?  :)

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