What software did you use to measure these drives?

For the Panasonic I used HD Tune in Windows XP. For the 486 I used a a DOS application called COREtest, a HD benchmarking application by CORE International.

COREtest has served me well as it measures read, write, and access time, and compares the results to other drives of the time. The tool was meant to advertise their product but it works just fine as a general benchmarking tool.

It does have a bug though where if you try to use it with a drive that is too fast then the result returned by the "read" test will loop around and return a value less than what it actually is. In this case, usually the write test will be accurate. For example, I used COREtest on a 30MB/s CF card and the read test looped around and returned 9MB/s; but the write test was accurate at about 28MB/s. If the write speed is ever faster than the read speed then you'll know that it derped on you.

Another great advantage of this tool is that it works in real-mode and does not require the use of a dos extender like EMM386.

I'm sure you're fishing for a link. Here it is. 😀

http://sta.c64.org/dosprg/core303.zip

Just curious, which SSD did you use? I know technically it doesn't matter when those computers will never fully utilise the SSD's speed.

I find coretest rather inaccurate, in fast computers it tends to read the speed of the hdd cache instead of real physical throughput.

I use Drhard, nice tool, does 10K and 64K block testing and acces times.

Zenn wrote:

Just curious, which SSD did you use? I know technically it doesn't matter when those computers will never fully utilise the SSD's speed.

Sandisk Ultra 4GB CompactFlash 30MB/s (with adapter) in the 486 to test its speed and a Samsung 128GB mSata (with adapter) in the PIII.

The drive I actually use in the 486 is a Sandisk 16GB Class 4 MicroSD + SD adapter + CF adapter + 44-pin IDE adapter. 🤣

did you load a dma driver on the 486?

Kahenraz wrote:

Zenn wrote:

Just curious, which SSD did you use? I know technically it doesn't matter when those computers will never fully utilise the SSD's speed.

Sandisk Ultra 4GB CompactFlash 30MB/s (with adapter) in the 486 to test its speed and a Samsung 128GB mSata (with adapter) in the PIII.

The drive I actually use in the 486 is a Sandisk 16GB Class 4 MicroSD + SD adapter + CF adapter + 44-pin IDE adapter. 🤣

Interesting that the SD adapter is actually recognized by the 486, are you using an onboard controller with a late 94 system bios (that can support LBA instead of just CHS) or an old isa controller card ? 😳

darksheer wrote:

Interesting that the SD adapter is actually recognized by the 486, are you using an onboard controller with a late 94 system bios (that can support LBA instead of just CHS) or an old isa controller card ? 😳

I'm using a BIOS extender, as I mentioned in my first post. And it's a laptop so there is no ISA expansion.

elianda wrote:

did you load a dma driver on the 486?

Ehh.. I wasn't aware of anything like this. Can you provide a link to a driver?

You can check capabilities with ctatbus.
The driver is chipset dependent, usually all older controller support at least Multi Word DMA 2.
You could have a look at the driver disks that were delivered with your laptop.

Kahenraz wrote:

I'm using a BIOS extender, as I mentioned in my first post. And it's a laptop so there is no ISA expansion.

My bad, I read it too fast 😒 the 44 pin IDE adapter should have say something to me though 🤣
By BIOS extender, do you mean a DDO, or a program that bypass the original BIOS settings and add new ones ? If it's only a DDO, it means that your 486 laptop could already see a sd using a sd to cf adapter from the begining (that would be pretty amazing) ? 😳

darksheer wrote:

By BIOS extender, do you mean a DDO, or a program that bypass the original BIOS settings and add new ones ?

It's a DDO. My laptop can ony natively "see" 504MB of the drive due to a BIOS limitation; again, see my first post.

Kahenraz wrote:

darksheer wrote:

By BIOS extender, do you mean a DDO, or a program that bypass the original BIOS settings and add new ones ?

It's a DDO. My laptop can ony natively "see" 504MB of the drive due to a BIOS limitation; again, see my first post.

Yeah I know for size limitation, it's just the fact that it can see and use the sd card through the sd/cf adapter with its default bios that seems amazing... My 486 motherboards won't detect my microSD to CF adpater even with a late 95 bios (with LBA support)... but the adapter work flawlessly starting from socket 7 motherboards 🤣

Well, the BIOS is kind of interesting. It actually detects and reports the drive size as "15192.0 MBytes" but when booting is throws a "Disk 0 Error".

In the BIOS there is an option when configuring the hard drives to "Select Operating System Type". The default, "Other Operating System" is what throws the error. But if you switch it to "DOS only or DOS and Windows" then the drive reports as 0.0MB in the BIOS but will boot as normal (with the 504MB limit). I don't remember if it reports as 504MB or throws an error if you write too far. Either way, it doesn't work by default. But since it boots, the DDO gets around the problem. 😀

It took a lot of futzing to figure out the write combination of BIOS settings to make it work.

elianda wrote:

You can check capabilities with ctatbus.
The driver is chipset dependent, usually all older controller support at least Multi Word DMA 2.

Is there a version of ctatbus in english?