I don't understand why you'd want to use a IDE to SATA converter

One of the reasons - because they won't be connected to PCI bus with everything else (sound cards, 3dfx, LAN etc).

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-28, 18:01:

I don't understand why you'd want to use a IDE to SATA converter

One of the reasons - because they won't be connected to PCI bus with everything else (sound cards, 3dfx, LAN etc).

Another reason is that bootable PCI controller cards (with BIOS ROM) tend to map at least some of their ROM (5 to 15 KB) to conventional memory . The Promise Ultra 133 TX2 (IDE) and SIL3114 based cards (SATA) are among those .
Using the integrated IDE controller avoids that and saves a PCI slot as well .

cde wrote on 2020-09-10, 18:51:

If you can disable UDMA in your BIOS and force PIO mode 4, consider this 2.5" SATA SSD (+3.5" adapter): Re: mSATA ssd adaptor in old pc

It has been working very well for me so far. One drawback is that mSATA drives are beginning to be more difficult to find and expensive.

In case someone stumbles upon this thread, I have found that Marvell 88SA8052-based adapters don't have the JM20330 DMA problem with old chipsets (in my case VIA686B), and support TRIM too. They are unfortunately difficult to find. Adapters from RENKFORCE, DeLOCK and Ableconn brands sometime carry the 88SA8052. Search for exemple "site:amazon.de 88SA8052" (or amazon.com) to find remaining stock.

https://www.amazon.de/Renkforce-MSATA-SSD-AUF … R/dp/B01ATC3J7O
https://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-IIDE-MSAT-2-5 … m/dp/B017VQT5YW
https://www.amazon.fr/Convertisseur-dinterfac … e/dp/B01ATC3J7O

I seem to remember in this era (I'm a huge Super Socket 7 fan) that even the mostly godly disk was maybe putting out 70mb/s (unit?) so most controllers, even if they did support Maxtor's ATA133 it didn't really matter outside of synthetics. There was no "shame" in only being able to run ATA100 because it simply wasn't the bottleneck. In fact many times if you were running overclock bus speeds like 75(112) or 83(124) a few final straws to try and stabilize that OC would be to step down to ATA66 or 33 - though if you're down to 33 it's YOLO time basically.

I guess my tl;dr is that most southbridge/EIDE drivers of the era prioritized doing anything to lower random access speed vs. max throughput, since nobody dreamed we'd have a single drive that could saturate an equivalent ATA600 link! I think it's pretty amazing people have gotten 90mb/s cause there's no way they could have tested that back in the day with an actual drive - it would have to have been some synthetic test rig blasting bit patterns or something.

So I wonder if setting lower ATA speeds of 66 or 100 might help these adapters? Since really the ATA133 spec really was a post-spec optimized for the Maxtor drives of the day? (I don't mean that as a negative, I give Maxtor a thumbs up for that!)

Sorry for the ramble, but keep posting your results - probing the edges of performance on these old systems is super fascinating to me.

Off Topic:
I'd love to see sometime tests on if things like the special inter-chipset interconnects used by say the SiS chipsets and such actually made a difference by bypassing PCI bus. Or even on older PCI driven southbridges if IDE speeds really were influenced by bus overclocking.

Thanks for the info xrror. About speed, I had a black 80-pin ASUS IDE cable that would cause the OS to downgrade the DMA speed to ATA66. I replaced the cable with another 80-pin cable and now get ATA100 speed which is the maximum supported by my controller (and actual speeds of 58 MB/s instead of the 50 MB/s I would get with ATA66).