Is there a way you could remove the control/interface board from a hard drive and be able to view the 256-512K of cache as a "drive", like you would use a RAMdisk? I have several old HD's (200-500Mbytes), I have no real use for anymore (and they're way too slow) ad figure this would be an interesting "hack" to be able to use their tiny cache as a "micro drive", of sorts.
Remember, back in the 80's, when the Apple II's had 128K of RAM? Or the Mac 128? Or Atari 8-bit... or Commodore Amiga... or the Atari 520ST? There was a tine when 512K of RAM (and less) was PLENTY. And RAMdisks DID exist for those computers, too.
So, the cache size of an old HD isn't so impossible to imagine a use for... if you think back to the days when such amounts of RAM weren't thought of as so small... but massive!
Just having fun with some old drives that have outlived their "modern usefulness"
If it can be done...
Luposian
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limit your datasets
if you only use as much data on the drive as fits in the cache, you should be able to hide the slow disk completely behind the cache. just create a 64k or 512k (depending on the cache size) filesystem or mmap the beginning of the device into your programs and activate write caching in the drive if it happens to be off. quite possibly only certain access patterns are cached, this depends on the cache algorithms. if the disk's firmware is non-broken, it has to stop working if there is no physical disk, because it then has no means to actually write the data.
many old disks have slow ide interfaces (pio mode), and your machine may run out of ide interfaces for all your disks quickly.
if you are lucky, the disk driver needs less memory than the cache can store.