Well I didn't see the driver you've used didn't work ... Perhaps it would work faster with the RIGHT drivers ^^.
Actually I have many drivers stored, so I just gave you the one I thought would work.

I have the same motherboad, so I know there are definitely drivers that do work on it (which is when I got all my ALi drivers actually).

Maybe this one will work ? (I've downloaded the same previously and this one claims to work with ALi Aladdin IV chipsets which is what we've got here ^^)

That one installed ok. It actually properly identifies the CF in device manager now instead of it being "generic type 47" or whatever. Read and Write speeds seem to be roughly the same as before though.
https://imgur.com/a/p4Uan6o

How fast does this card run in a CF card adaptor on a modern PC? Could it be this particular card is simply maxing out at 14MB/s?

the one is supposed to have read speeds of up to 120MB/s and write speeds of up to 85MB/s. When I tested it on my win 10 machine with a CF adapter to usb it wrote at 10mb... so wtf? it was sold by sandisk on amazon. So did I format it wrong some how? its in fat32 and was formatted from a legitimate windows 98 SE disc. I'm so confused.

Which kind of IDE cable do you use ? 40 wires or 80 wires ? I don't think UDMA33 should be impacted by this but you never know ...

Deksor wrote on 2020-02-03, 20:28:

Which kind of IDE cable do you use ? 40 wires or 80 wires ? I don't think UDMA33 should be impacted by this but you never know ...

pretty sure its 40 wire. ill order an 80 wire and report back.

Also, did you try to benchmark the speeds of the old drive that did work with that board ?

Deksor wrote on 2020-02-03, 20:41:

Also, did you try to benchmark the speeds of the old drive that did work with that board ?

oh yea I did. It was pretty bad even with DMA on. Highest was 6mb with DMA on.

You may want to try formatting the card using a modern OS. FAT32 should not be a problem but try NTFS with standard values and benchmark the card again. If it's still slow you probably got an underperforming card or maybe even a fake.
If it's faster that way try formatting it with the same sector size under FAT32.

Anyway there's probably not going to be much of a real life performance increase going from 14MB/s to ~30MB/s. Having fast access times and having DMA enabled should give you the greatest noticeable performance bump on this system. So even if the card doesn't work as advertised it shouldn't be too bad.

Doornkaat wrote on 2020-02-04, 07:37:

You may want to try formatting the card using a modern OS. FAT32 should not be a problem but try NTFS with standard values and benchmark the card again. If it's still slow you probably got an underperforming card or maybe even a fake.
If it's faster that way try formatting it with the same sector size under FAT32.

Anyway there's probably not going to be much of a real life performance increase going from 14MB/s to ~30MB/s. Having fast access times and having DMA enabled should give you the greatest noticeable performance bump on this system. So even if the card doesn't work as advertised it shouldn't be too bad.

I must have never installed the chipset drivers or the usb drivers for my win 10 machine or my one CF card reader is just a gigantic bottleneck. Not sure which. Any way I Installed some drivers and now I'm getting speeds like you'd expect. The 16GB CF is the one I use currently for my win98 machine and it got a max read speed of 40MB on my win10 machine. So at least we know the cards are working properly.

Have you tried disabling write behind caching? I don't know if that'll help with the slow speeds and the usual problems shouldn't be linked to yours but some flash based drives without actual caches don't like this and trying won't do any harm.
http://www.jacsoft.co.nz/Omnis/wbc.shtml

disabled write behind caching but speeds stayed the same

alright so putting in a 80 wire cable didnt do anything. So I got an Ultra100 tx2 in the mail today and installed that and finally hit 33MBs. I shut off the primary IDE controller in my BIOS and just use this thing. I left my CD-ROM and floppy drive on the secondary controller and the CD-ROM still works in DOS. So case solved I guess. Whatever works. not sure why I'm not hitting the 50 MB read speeds the card is advertised to hit with this thing but I'm satisfied. Maybe I'll try another cable or CF some time to see if I can get faster but I'm fine with this.

https://imgur.com/a/ZYWPsHd

FSOD wrote on 2020-02-05, 22:16:

alright so putting in a 80 wire cable didnt do anything. So I got an Ultra100 tx2 in the mail today and installed that and finally hit 33MBs. I shut off the primary IDE controller in my BIOS and just use this thing. I left my CD-ROM and floppy drive on the secondary controller and the CD-ROM still works in DOS. So case solved I guess. Whatever works. not sure why I'm not hitting the 50 MB read speeds the card is advertised to hit with this thing but I'm satisfied. Maybe I'll try another cable or CF some time to see if I can get faster but I'm fine with this. If any one else finds themselves in this situation this seems to be a pretty decent work around. It was pretty easy to setup to.

https://imgur.com/a/ZYWPsHd