What exactly would you be doing with such a system, where ATA33 would be a 'horrible bottleneck'? Have you ever actually tried it, or are you just getting hung up on the numbers? Because that's not a limitation you're likely to notice much, if at all, in everyday use... it really only matters when you're transferring lots of large files back and forth between drives on the same system.

And besides that, just how much performance are you expecting to get, anyway? The 440BX/GX uses a single PCI bus for all peripherals, including connection of the southbridge to the northbridge... that's a theoretical total of 133MB/sec (and more like 90-100MB/sec in practical terms) shared between IDE, ethernet, USB, sound, and whatever other non-AGP devices you have installed. At best, you're never going to get 'modern' performance out of a system like that... take it for what it is.

The only reason I'd see to use an add-on controller is if you want to use >128GB drives... and for that I'd just skip IDE and get a SATA card. (Though you'd have to be careful about Win98 compatibility with such a thing.)

In my experience there is a bit of a boost with UDMA 100/133 over the UDMA 33 on the PIIX4E. You need to have a semi-modern hard drive (2003?) and a faster CPU like a PIII ~1000 or Tualatin.

It's not that big of a boost though (and how often do you max out the storage subsystem anyway?). There is also a tendency for PCI IDE cards to upset 440BX PCI bus. It can get tricky finding the right card/slot order to make the system stable. Sticking to the onboard IDE is easier.

I've used Promise Ultra66, Promise SATA 150 TX2, and a noname Silicon Image UDMA133 card.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

What exactly would you be doing with such a system, where ATA33 would be a 'horrible bottleneck'? Have you ever actually tried it, or are you just getting hung up on the numbers? Because that's not a limitation you're likely to notice much, if at all, in everyday use... it really only matters when you're transferring lots of large files back and forth between drives on the same system.

And besides that, just how much performance are you expecting to get, anyway? The 440BX/GX uses a single PCI bus for all peripherals, including connection of the southbridge to the northbridge... that's a theoretical total of 133MB/sec (and more like 90-100MB/sec in practical terms) shared between IDE, ethernet, USB, sound, and whatever other non-AGP devices you have installed. At best, you're never going to get 'modern' performance out of a system like that... take it for what it is.

The only reason I'd see to use an add-on controller is if you want to use >128GB drives... and for that I'd just skip IDE and get a SATA card. (Though you'd have to be careful about Win98 compatibility with such a thing.)

I'm not expecting modern hard drive performance out of the rig, but I do tend to max out these retro rigs if anything just because I have the option of doing so. I also want to pull game images off of an NAS box so I can avoid using an optical drive unless absolutely necessary and would like to max out performance with that if possible. If there are other areas that I may be limited in speed then I'll try out the onboard controller and see how I work out with that.

I also want to pull game images off of an NAS box so I can avoid using an optical drive unless absolutely necessary and would like to max out performance with that if possible.

Remember, 100mbit ethernet is only 12MB/sec at best. So unless you've got a gigabit card in your retro machine, and a fancy NAS with gigabit ethernet (and the performance to actually fill that much bandwidth), then the ATA33 speed will not be a limitation.

And even if you do have a badass network system like that, a gigabit card in the retro machine will still have to share the PCI bus bandwidth with the IDE controller.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I also want to pull game images off of an NAS box so I can avoid using an optical drive unless absolutely necessary and would like to max out performance with that if possible.

Remember, 100mbit ethernet is only 12MB/sec at best. So unless you've got a gigabit card in your retro machine, and a fancy NAS with gigabit ethernet (and the performance to actually fill that much bandwidth), then the ATA33 speed will not be a limitation.

And even if you do have a badass network system like that, a gigabit card in the retro machine will still have to share the PCI bus bandwidth with the IDE controller.

Sounds like onboard is the way to go then. Thanks for the advice on that. 😀

You can get a Intel Pro 1000 GT NIC for cheap and these cards have drivers back to DOS. I don't even use 100mbit NICs anymore. PCI and Win9x are bottlenecks but you will saturate UDMA33.

I suppose there is no such thing as a (PCI) DOS bootable SATA card then ? 😒

(for a time in the near? future when IDE drives are all dead, and the mobo has no native SATA, only IDE)

I've tried a few pure IDE cards as well, and one that seemed to actually boot(Sil0680A chip), after a loooong 'thinking period', made Doom2 totally crash with a 'granular' error milliseconds after launch ('doom2' + Enter)....
Weird.

For the record, the game plays perfectly fine when hdd directly attached to the native mobo IDE port. (bare board, cpu+mem+old vga, DOS 6.20)

What about SATA to IDE cards you can get? They just plug into your IDE port and have a controller chip that translates SATA commands to IDE.

You mean special adapters ?

But if I understand you correctly, I would then be left with only 2 devices, 1 for each IDE slot, right ?

That's the downside yes. I don't know how well they support older machines but I have used them in the past.

@bestemor

SATA PCI cards work in DOS just like a PCI PATA card does. These SATA/PATA cards almost always have their own BIOS that loads after the system BIOS and sets up the ports to be usable without special drivers.

Your problem above could possibly be some motherboard BIOS setting causing problems with the card. It could also be a symptom of the PCI bus not operating correctly with the cards installed in the order they are.

The adapters that allow you to run a SATA drive on a PATA controller vary in quality. I bought a very cheap one on ebay and it turned out to be very slow.

The ones I'm talking about are small cards that just take a floppy power cable and plug into a current IDE port. They translate SATA commands to IDE.

Yeah, and those are pretty hit or miss... there doesn't seem to be any sort of quality control on 'em, so it pretty much depends on how hung-over the particular assembly line worker was at the time. Out of seemingly identical cards, some work great, with only a small reduction in performance, some kinda work but are really slow, and some don't work at all. And some are wired backwards and catch fire.

Fortunately, they're so cheap, you can still get a pretty good deal by playing the lottery... buy a dozen of 'em, and you'll probably get at least a few that work well. Just check them carefully before you plug them in... I wasn't kidding about the fire.

Thanks for all input, guys!

As for motherboard beeing the culprit, I'm not so sure, but maybe the newer cards are less forgiving or lack 'legacy bios communications skills' ?

I've found an older IDE only card(1999ish), 66mhz bus, that proves to actually work perfectly with Doom2, no crash.
And boots quite fast as well, no waiting at all apart from the quick show off from the second bios - of connected hardware found.

As for "..the cards installed in the order they are.", does that mean which slot ? The mobo has been pretty vacant during these tests, only the very bare minimum.
NO other cards apart from the lone PCI graphics card, and they are far apart.
Hmm, maybe I'll test that(placement/slot) out, but the old IDE card mentioned above used the same slot, with nothing else changed, so... 😐

swaaye wrote:

These SATA/PATA cards almost always have their own BIOS that loads after the system BIOS and sets up the ports to be usable without special drivers.

Any particular card models/chipsets that has proven to actually boot from SATA?

VIA6421A sure doesn't boot from the IDE port - much less shows any BIOS info (nothing at ALL happen, just regular POST which asks for something bootable, card just sits there like dead). And there ARE 2 chips on the card, one smaller one I suspect is meant to pass as a bios.

With that in mind, any reason SATA would happen to work when IDE does not, when all ports origin from the same chip ?
(I have no bootable SATA disk atm, hence my testing is slightly skewed... 😜 )

Yeah I meant slot order. I've had a lot of trouble with my 440BX Abit BF6 when it comes to the order that I install PCI cards.

As for bootable SATA cards, the only SATA card that I have is a Promise SATA150 TX2 and it will boot off the SATA ports. I even managed to get a 486 to boot with it.