Just casually though I recently popped a SCSI2SD v6 with a Samsung Evo "Select" card in my beige g3, because it feelsl ike the beige has gotten less reliable. It is "fine" -- it's a bit better at actually booting when first asked with the SCSI2SD, so I suspect the original 8GB Quantum disk is dying. I'm not super surprised about this, given I've encountered another dead Quantum disk (4GB) from a beige G3 desktop and after discussing it in #68kMLA.
I've got MacBench 4 on hand and I intended to do a full bench of the disk in the SCSI2SD but the machine crashes during the publishing benchmark, so I'm chalking it up to some of the oddly specific things the machine does at that point.
Anyway, I have a newer Maxtor 40GB IDE disk which I formatted in a firewire case the other day, so tentatively my plan is to put that in, restore the contents of the old disk to it, and then MacBench that, as well, to see where these things lie.
I've got a slightly higher spec SanDisk SD card I might try, and I also have a SCSI2SD v5 I've been meaning to try.
I realize among the most expensive options for this particular machine, but in general the SCSI2SD v6, paired with a good SD card gets a vote of confidence from me.
without the downside of hitting the HD all the time.
Apple's own VM implementation
does not do this. VM on Classic Mac OS never has. If the hard disk is being hit, it's because the machine is out of real memory. In my experience, this is true as far back as 7.6.1 (which is the oldest I usually run, personally, and is the minimum I'll run on any given PPC.
68k Macs, notably, are different because they have physical PMMU chips or on-CPU circuitry and can handle some of the more advanced memory management stuff without having VM turned on.
If you have enough RAM to turn off VM, you should probably leave it on anyway, your RAM will go further and your apps will launch faster.
If you don't have enough RAM to turn off VM, consider whether you are picking appropriate software and tasks for the machine you have. Mac OS 9 and a bunch of 2000-2003 software won't run well in anything less than 128MB of RAM. Mac OS 8 and a bunch of 1996-1998 software won't run well in any less than about 24 megs of RAM, for example.