Which OS do you want to use?

I like using IDE to SATA adapters along with an SSD. The IDE to CF card route is also another option.

Either of those will give you the max performance without a caching controller.

If you want to keep everything retro, keep the caching controller.

As for using the generic I/O along side the caching controller, you should be able to find the jumper settings online to disable the idea controller.

I really want to keep the 420 drive as boot drive, but as primary slave I've got a CF adapter installed. Mainly for data transfer. As long as hard drives<500MB stroll are available for reasonable prices I want to keep running them. After that, the CF/SSD will become boot drives.

The cache controller indeed would be my first choose to keep.

I will look intro the controller to see what settings are available to disable IDE and FDD.

Edit: also found this in my spare parts box: a single IDE port VLB I/o controller.
It looks like toggling jp8 and jo9 should do the trick.
Not sure what jp5 does... Is this the HDD controller?

Any way, I'll just test this one and see what happens 😀

To cache controller it is.

With the regular VLB I/o controller all things seem to work fine.
I disabled hdc, FDD and HDD by setting jumpers jp5, jp8, jp9 to position 2-3 and almost all seemed to work:
- mouse in Windows and Xtree Gold works fine.
- no errors on boot post screen
- no conflict in checkit
- CDROM is suddenly NOT detected any more.

This CDROM issue seems to be a conflict between the Promise controller and the videcdd driver, as it worked fine before.

Maybe I could see if I can enable the hdc on the I/o card and add the CDROM to its IDE connector, without enabling the IDE jumper. Hopefully this jumper jp9 is just ment to assign IRQ and stuff, so the IDE will act like a non-adressed one.
Otherwise I'll have to look into my collection of sound cards to see if I have one with IDE onboard and swap it

Remember that cache controller only makes sense if you're using a period correct harddrive. If you have a newer drive, or CF card the CPU on the controller will bottleneck the transfer rates, at that point you're better off with a standard VLB controller.

Still, cache controllers are cool, so if you intend to keep using the 420MB go for it 😀

vetz wrote on 2020-10-12, 10:52:

(...)
Still, cache controllers are cool, so if you intend to keep using the 420MB go for it 😀

Definately :p

There is a CF adapter installed as primary slave, but that's only intended for file transfer 😀