If optimising RAID storage for later Intel Chipsets running XP (and Win7 too), the combination of Intel RAID ROM module v11.2.0.1527 (via BIOS mod) and RST driver v11.2.0.1006 will unleash the full performance of your array.
Everything you need starts here https://www.win-raid.com/t25f23-Which-are-the … ID-drivers.html
There are versions which backport Intel's TRIM on RAID feature and I've had no issues on three generations of chipset.

If you're doing a BIOS mod like this you may as well consider updating other modules such the board's other disk controllers or even LAN BIOS if that's something you use and feel should be running better and/or has documented bugs that weren't patched by the latest BIOS.
If you want to enable the meltdown/spectre patches on Win 7 you can even patch the latest Intel CPU microcode that your motherboard manufacturer doesn't want to spend a little time providing.

There are other neat modules that are normally applied to mass licensed PCs too

BushLin wrote:

Promise make solid controller cards but that particular one is a bit too new for Windows 98

There's always the SATA150 version, that has drivers for 98. 😎

BushLin wrote:

and if you're running XP you'll get much more bandwidth on an Intel chipset

Of course, a more modern chipset provides extra performance, but when you are stuck with a motherboard that has an old chipset (i.e. 440BX, VIA Apollo Pro 133A/T etc.) and only has an ancient onboard ATA66/ATA100 controller, you want to off-load the CPU as much as possible and use the fastest storage medium you can afford. In that case, a PCI SATA controller is a salvation, you can definitely feel the difference compared to the onboard controller. I picked up the Promise because the Silicon Image SIL3112 I had before just refused to work with my SSD and WD Velociraptor, refusing to write on them and spitting out inexistent bad sectors. That was annoying, considering I have a very high esteem of Silicon Image, after having used their awesome SIL0680 ATA133 controller before switching to native SATA. 😠

Now that you mention RAID, I do have a SATA RAID card too... Makes me curious to try it, one day, but I'd have to get an identical SSD and make a clean installation of XP. But I'm quite curious about the outcome.

By the way, I've currently enabled the pagefile on the Velociraptor data drive. It seems (apparently) that the system is even more responsive. I guess sharing the load between the drives helps.

looking4awayout wrote:

Now that you mention RAID, I do have a SATA RAID card too... Makes me curious to try it, one day, but I'd have to get an identical SSD and make a clean installation of XP. But I'm quite curious about the outcome.

Well if it's on the systems you mentioned and we're talking standard length 32-bit PCI slot/card then the whole bus has a theoretical 133MB/s, so somewhere south of that. But you may find gains on things like sustained random access or mixed read/write performance over a single drive... or the controller might suck, or the driver, or the firmware! (your drives have firmware too, old school sysadmins will only run drives with the same firmware revision in an array).

Also... I've never understood the default of large stripe sizes, especially if you're limited by bus bandwidth. If your partition's cluster size is going to be 4k, why not adjust accordingly? If you're not going to get any better sequential performance with a large stripe, get the io performance that's on offer with a tiny one... ideally, test the outcomes before committing to a configuration.

The IDE adapter cost me about 25$.

They cost peanuts from aliexpress.

Indeed, i paid about 5 Euro for some IDE-SATA adapters. That was an expensive one, because it had to fit into an MacMini. Even de SD-IDE adapters are around 3-5 Euros.

So i made some test with my XP-Machine, first of all it is an i3 3rd Generation with SATA-2, so it is not that old. This could also be interesting for @mothergoose729: I did a speed test before and after the alignment. And this is just a normal HDD not an SSD at this point. I noticed the read speed won't change, but the write speed increases from 82mb/s to 101mb/s. You said you have a write speed of 30-120mb/s, that's sound a little to less to me. For alignment i used MiniTool Partition Wizard, there is an Option to Align. Maybe you also try it and report the difference. Also changing to AHCI would give some performance boost. Some time ago i did some tests with W7 and SSD on an SATA-3 board. While on IDE-mode the max read was about 450mb/s and on AHCI it was around 570mb/s.

After the alignment windows xp nagged about reactivating, but that worked fine. I also changed the Bios from IDE-mode to AHCI-mode and windows XP still working 😁, so i think I'm ready for the SSD now. I just planned to clone the Boot partition onto the SSD, after i created an aligned partition. After that i going to make some changes as mentioned earlier.

Roman78 wrote:

Indeed, i paid about 5 Euro for some IDE-SATA adapters. That was an expensive one, because it had to fit into an MacMini. Even de SD-IDE adapters are around 3-5 Euros.

So i made some test with my XP-Machine, first of all it is an i3 3rd Generation with SATA-2, so it is not that old. This could also be interesting for @mothergoose729: I did a speed test before and after the alignment. And this is just a normal HDD not an SSD at this point. I noticed the read speed won't change, but the write speed increases from 82mb/s to 101mb/s. You said you have a write speed of 30-120mb/s, that's sound a little to less to me. For alignment i used MiniTool Partition Wizard, there is an Option to Align. Maybe you also try it and report the difference. Also changing to AHCI would give some performance boost. Some time ago i did some tests with W7 and SSD on an SATA-3 board. While on IDE-mode the max read was about 450mb/s and on AHCI it was around 570mb/s.

After the alignment windows xp nagged about reactivating, but that worked fine. I also changed the Bios from IDE-mode to AHCI-mode and windows XP still working 😁, so i think I'm ready for the SSD now. I just planned to clone the Boot partition onto the SSD, after i created an aligned partition. After that i going to make some changes as mentioned earlier.

Interesting, I'll have to try changing the alignment later.

I have never been able to get XP to boot in AHCI mode. How do you manage that?

mothergoose729 wrote:

I have never been able to get XP to boot in AHCI mode. How do you manage that?

Install the drivers.

Personally, I use nLite to make a custom WinXP SP3 install CD with Intel RST drivers integrated (and unnecessary Windows components removed) so it's all enabled and working correctly during install.

mothergoose729 wrote:

I have never been able to get XP to boot in AHCI mode. How do you manage that?

Sometimes it is very frustrating. Here i have an Esprimo and i was unable to get AHCI working, even with SP3 installation medium which should AHCI integrated. I tried several drivers and scripts, nothing worked. On my XP-Rig on the other hand i did nothing, just set the Bios from IDE to AHCI an apparently the driver was already included. Also from a XP SP3 installation medium.

In my 200Mhz MMX built, I have a 120GB SATA disk A400 by Kingston hooked via Axagon RSI-X1 bi-directional SATA-IDE adapter
My mainboard is PcChips M560 rev 3 - it detects some ~10GB partition, and I am running Win98SE on it
https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/consumer/sa400s37
https://www.axagon.eu/en/produkty/rsi-x1
http://www.elhvb.com/webhq/models/pcchips/m560.htm
It works well enough, although I had initially a few hiccups during windows installation, and it was occasinally locking up. Never got the time to troubleshoot it. Now it sees to be working fine - good enough for occasional gaming. Great bonus is the silence - whirring old HDDs noises being nostalgic as they are, it gets tiresome after a while.

Can anyone recommend a compact flash or sd card adapter that doesn't always or occassionally wipe or corrupt the card on power down? So far I am unable to find one that doesn't have this problem.