Well from my experience it doesn't really matter which ISA I/O card you use... never benchmarked any but the ISA bus is the limitation here.
For a high end DX4 machine you really should invest in a VLB controller IMHO

thats something new to me frankly, when i had a cyrix 5x85 100 i remember the mass storage was nowhere near saturating isa; admittedly i had an old disk; but i doubt that this changes a lot;but i would expect the best speedup you could get now to be scsi;

I've got an ISA controller with a 1GB Seagate Medalist and it seems very speedy. Seems that hdd benchmarks under speedsys are way above average. So at least from my perspective, an ISA controller is plenty fast for a 486.

can you share the numbers? what load does reading writing cause?

It's been a while, but I recall Windows 95 installed fine with VLB card with standard IDE drivers, but then you could install a 32-bit driver once it was up and going, or enable 32-bit mode.

I don't recall benchmarking before and after- it would be good to know. I had a Seagate Medalist 1G also... I'm sure there had to be a performance difference or the cards likely wouldn't exist...

Hello 1994 and Windows 95 Beta testing!

r.cade wrote:

Hello 1994 and Windows 95 Beta testing!

Thanks, now I'm scared! I'll have nightmares tonight. 😵

Jo22 wrote:

r.cade wrote:

Hello 1994 and Windows 95 Beta testing!

Thanks, now I'm scared! I'll have nightmares tonight. 😵

I went from the Amiga 3000 to a 486/33 with early Windows 95 beta test versions (the ones on 7 or 8 floppies).

It was a good transition for me- it was early Internet and browsing never worked well on the Amiga.

r.cade wrote:

I went from the Amiga 3000 to a 486/33 with early Windows 95 beta test versions (the ones on 7 or 8 floppies).

It was a good transition for me- it was early Internet and browsing never worked well on the Amiga.

Ah, I see. We ran Windows 95 RTM on a 386DX40. My own PC was a 286 with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.10.
I went a few times online with both of them. At the time, I was logging-in into CompuServe Classic from my own PC.
It must have been somewhen in the mid-90s, I believe.

Anyway, may I ask you which version of AmigaOS or Workbench/Kick you were used to run ?
I'm still learning about it. my first Amiga was an A500, but I wished it was an A2000.
I heard there was no true TCP/IP stack for AmigaOS 1.x, but an older AX.25 stack from the amateur radio field.

@ keropi: I have already occupied the two vlb slots, and I don't have a vlb I-O card in my collection.

@ clueless1: I do have a couple of those Medalist drives, perhaps the greatest gain I can achieve is to put one of those to use?

I have no issues as of now booting dos and 3.11 and running some games from that era, using the Winbond w83757f. Maybe I'll just stick to what works. If I was building a 486 in '94 I would probably cheap out on such anyways, spending more on CPU and cache.

In DOS only there isn't any meaningful difference between ISA and VLB HDD transfer rate. For hard drives up to 2GB in size, the HDD is the limit itself. ISA bus has limit around 1.6MB/s... if it's overclocked, a bit more - around 2MB/s. Smaller HDD's have transfer rates from 300KB/s up to 1MB/s. It's another matter if you want to use CF cards as these have much higher transfer rates and bus is the limiting factor.

excuse me how the corn did You calculate/measure that limit?

kixs wrote:

In DOS only there isn't any meaningful difference between ISA and VLB HDD transfer rate. For hard drives up to 2GB in size, the HDD is the limit itself. ISA bus has limit around 1.6MB/s... if it's overclocked, a bit more - around 2MB/s.

The flaw in the reasoning there is that the ISA bus has a 1.6 MB/s limit combined for all ISA devices.
Which means that when you use the HDD, it will steal most of that bandwidth, leaving very little for other devices.
With a VLB controller, you are only stealing bandwidth from the VLB devices, which usually is only the video card, and the VLB bandwidth is so high that the HDD transfer speed is negligible.

In practice it may not matter much though, since there's not a lot of multitasking or background processing going on... So when your HDD runs, your system is usually frozen anyway. I suppose you'd mostly notice it with video playback, where you'd use the bus for HDD transfers, audio output and video output at the same time. But we weren't really doing that much yet in the 486 age. And when we did, everything was low-bandwidth anyway, because these systems weren't very good at playing back video.
I recall playing Need for Speed on my 486... that streamed video from the CD, but I think you only needed a double-speed CD-ROM for that, so that would only be 300 KB/s. Even an ISA bus wouldn't be bothered by that.
I wouldn't know though, my 486 had a VLB video card and multi-IO.

why do You say isa only gives 1.6 MBps? imho it's closer to 10x that

mrau wrote:

why do You say isa only gives 1.6 MBps? imho it's closer to 10x that

Correct.
ISA bus is a 16-bit bus, so 2 bytes per cycle.
It runs at about 8.33 MHz max under normal conditions.
Hence 8.33*2 = ~16.66 MB/s.

Mind you, VLB is a 32-bit bus, so 4 bytes per cycle.
It usually runs at 33.33 MHz (assuming a 486DX2-66 or DX4-100).
So 33.33.*4 = ~133 MB/s.

mrau wrote:

excuse me how the corn did You calculate/measure that limit?

I didn't calculate it. That is the usual number different benchmark programs give for HDD transfer rate. It not much difference (if at all) between ISA and VLB - tested in DOS on 486 VLB system sometime ago.

kixs wrote:

I didn't calculate it. That is the usual number different benchmark programs give for HDD transfer rate. It not much difference (if at all) between ISA and VLB - tested in DOS on 486 VLB system sometime ago.

The VLB controllers are probably best at home in Win9x or NT. Of course you'd need to install the appropriate drivers for 32-bit transfers in Windows, but then you get to take full advantage of the controller.
Obviously, you'd need to pair it with a HDD that is fast enough to make a difference. Which your average consumer HDD wasn't really, at the time, I suppose 😀

ok let me present my experience with this - on my cyrix 5x86 100 with 8 megs of ram i wanted to play nfs2 se and quake (vision 868 1mb i believe);
i always had to take the cdrom out of the equation (by way of crack or just playing without music - quake) or even minimize partitions (separate 128 mb partition in fat 16 for nfs) and get rid of disk accessing processes to get it to a semifluent level of speed;
its not much data - is it? the cd itself did some 150kbps playing music but slowed the system to a criminal level;
i always believed that it was the amount of code to proces ans amount of steps to do to fetch a piece of data that really broke the deal; i never managed to check that because i always lacked the money;