Reply 20 of 21, by Samir
wrote:SUCCESSS....... Yippieee..... I tried the installation suite/tools that I found online, and tested the card with the tools. […]
SUCCESSS....... Yippieee..... I tried the installation suite/tools that I found online, and tested the card with the tools.
Then wrote the exact drive parameters in the motherboard BIOS, by hand, although the motherboard can autodetect.
Then I rebooted and had contact with the harddrive (16gb Seagate) and I had contact with the Conner (540mb) that I have.
I had contact with two different CF cards the same way... One is a 512mb and the other is a 32mb.This is great... It just need a very specific way of installing a harddrive on.
A way of installing that I have not seen before. Nor ever tried.
This thing of manually having to enter the drive parameters when motherboard supports autodetecting.I am not quite shure why this is. I think it is because the motherboard autodetect tool can not see through the 80186/Controller-BIOS.
Autodetection of anything back in these days was extremely hit or miss (hence 'plug and pray' was very popular for years as a motto, 🤣). Especially when it came to add-in hard drive controllers with their own bios. This is why building computers back in those days took a lot of time and meticulous attention to detail.
Now that you have that card working, you have to remember that as an ISA card, it's going to be speed limited, especially since ever io request will interrupt the cpu. Hopefully the way that cache is designed it should really, really help. But from what I recall from a now 'ancient' pc mag article on hardware caching controllers vs smartdrv was that the performance gain was about the same, ie hardware caching controllers were a waste of money.
