I got rid of my SCSI drives (well they are in the basement now) becasue I couldn'T stand the noise anymore. OPther than that I have no idea.

In my opinion a separate IDE controller isn't worth installing unless it comes with an LBA BIOS (eliminating the 8GB barrier of the onboard controller) and support for DMA modes.

Caching IDE controllers were only popular for a short time. Most of the cheaper models are not worth considering, they only do CHS adressing and PIO modes, and often are slower than software caches. Almost all of them need a TSR under DOS which is incompatible with many programs.

Well another thought is that most newer hard drives have 8-16mb of cache on them anyway. A controller such as the:

promise ultra133 tx2 http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail … d&product_id=87

might be a good option then? I guess you could also go nuts and get a SATA drive/controller, but that's probably overkill.

if you have enough memory then when running programs the speed of the disk isn't that important. it might speed up the loading times a bit, but I personally wouldn't consider that a gain. unless you like to run a different application every other minute

fallout and ultima VII are two games with annoying loading times, system shock is another - there are probably others out there.

The extra size and silence of newer disk drives are bonuses also to my mind.

fallout and ultima VII are two games with annoying loading times, system shock is another - there are probably others out there.

The loading times are more a problem of CPU power and with a special driver (I think it's called UMBPCI or something like that) you can squeeze smartdrv in for games like Ultima7. I don't think it's worth to get an ide controller for the caching...

Of course a faster CPU would improve this, but I'm trying to maximise the performance of the 486 I have - not upgrade the entire system.

I could probably squeeze smartdrv in without umbpci (which apparently doesn't work on 486 computers anyway - RDOSUMB is what should be used), but I prefer having things done in hardware.

From the responses, I guess nobody has actually attempted this? I guess I might give it a shot and see (guess I'll have to find some sort of benchmarking utility).