George Morrow, who has has more companies shot from under him than most by the vagaries of fortune and is still a great engineer, is busy inventing again and his latest brainchild is a $300 disk controller card for personal computers that is claimed to accelerate hard disk accesses five-fold. Working out of Foster City, California, Morrow and his partner Darrell Tycehurst plan to ship the new $300 disk controller board before April according to Newsbytes. Called the Cacheflow, the multi-function input-output board packs an 8MHz NEC V40 80188-equivalent microprocessor with 512Kb of cache, and as well as improving the speed, it automatically backs up hard disks without interrupting the host AT-alike computer. The full-slot-sized card replaces the existing AT-bus disk controller. The speed is achieved by abandoning first in, first out cache flushing by management algorithms that manage the contents of the buffer by frequency of use so that the system improves in speed as a session continues. Ticehurst says that he has yet to patent the technology, and distribution arrangements for the thing are being finalised.
