My favorite program in DOS was smartdrv.exe. I know it’s much more late addition, but it was a game-changer for these slow hard drives. Even a tiny cache size (I believe I tried kilobytes range) sped up things like 10-20x.

Even windows 3.x and 95 (surpisingly) ran faster with smartdrv preloaded. 95’s default cache for some reason was worse than smartdrv and literally produced harder sounds on my hdds.

The second favorite was a TSR NG viewer, can’t remember the name.