Pretty sure it is not going to work. The SATA 300 controllers only have drivers that work with 2000 or XP or newer. They most definitely were never tested with anything older.

You might be able to get away with a Promise S150 TX2 or TX4 in Windows 3.11 as those at least support Windows 98.

It won't go full speed without drivers, but I think it should work.

Anybody else tried a SATA controller with Windows 3.11?

Windows 3.1x uses the Int 13h interface to access the hard drive by default. The only storage drivers in the OS are those used for the "32-bit disk access" (protected mode drivers), which is disabled by default.

Instead of using a SATA controller (for which no Windows 3.x drivers exist because SATA is years newer than Win 3.x), try using a connector adapter that allows you to attach the SATA drive to a regular IDE cable. Still won't work with all drives, probably.

While I speak heresy in the face of VOGONS by saying SATA on a 3.11 machine is pointless, I unfortunately have to stand by it.

Interesting? Yes.

At all a good idea? Noooooo + o^24642

Not only will you be wasting almost every single GB of storage on that hard drive, you would get compatibility issues not just with Windows. There is one option though. Find a SATA controller that supports legacy IDE emulation mode. This basically makes the SATA controller look like IDE. It's available on slightly newer systems however, and for an old PC with an expansion card will have to be an on card BIOS setting. This should however solve any issues, removing the need for drivers.

That makes it possible, and it will work, but the issue arises when you realize that no matter what the file system, Windows 3.11 can not access more than 2GB per partition (Possibly per drive, have not checked). So you're either gonna have to make LOADS of 2GB DOS partitions on something FreeDOS or Dos 7.1 (euugh) or deal with most of your drive being unusable.

There's also the speed. Due to IDE legacy mode, you will be limited to at best 133mbit/s and at worst less. Aside from maybe an access time increase on the newer drives (Which can be had with flash storage anyways) you won't get any benefits.

But as I have previously said, Welcome to VOGONS! Do your crazy shit NOBODY in their right mind would. I am using a 2004 IBM EServer as a regular, every day server, and a Athlon 64 x2 as a HTPC. I still print using Dot Matrix too.

@McCarthy I could be wrong, but I think Win 3.1 can access the fixed disk either via DOS API (int21h), the BIOS service routines (in13h)
or directly (driver). The first one should always work, as long as DOS itself can handle the disk (which it seemingly does, since you got it installed).
That's why I'm surprised you got any problems here. So May I ask if you did try to the disable swapfile, too ?

In case you haven't just open system.ini and add "Paging=No" in [386Enh] section.
You can use edit to do this, for example (edit c:\windows\system.ini)

It should look something like this:

[386Enh]
Paging=No
display=vdds3vsn.386
EGA80WOA.FON=EGA80WOA.FON
EGA40WOA.FON=EGA40WOA.FON
CGA80WOA.FON=CGA80WOA.FON
CGA40WOA.FON=CGA40WOA.FON
...

Thank you guys, I'm feeling very welcome 😀
@Jo22 I'll give it a try.
@Ampera Interesting suggestion, maybe there's a custom bios around for the tx2300.

i used win 3.11 wfwg on core i7 3770 with chipset SATAs and has no big problems. work via int13 in ahci and ide mode (buggy, no 3xx port, only ffxx, it was big problem for 9x), no 32 bit disk access. but on that fastest machine 32bda is useless.
3.11 was run with trumpet tcp over RL2000 pci ethernet card and all browsers, Opera, IE, Netscape - all work good.
so no problems with Sata, but can be problems with legacy support in your controller's bios.

Jo22, you're the man, it works, I can't believe it.
Thank you guys for your help.