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VIA Epia and slow USB FDD

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First post, by serenitatis

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I have very nice PC with VIA Epia 5000 mobo and VIA C3 CPU. Also this board have USB FDD support. If plug in USB floppy drive it's mapped like drive A and also support booting. But It's works VERY slow. Boot with basic MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk takes about 2 minutes. Floppy drive is 100% good. Diskette is also OK.

BTW, I try same thing with few other PCs. Same disk and USB FDD.

  • My retro PC with Athlon XP - also very slow
  • HP laptop from circa 2001 - speed is OK
  • IBM Thinkpad T42 - speed is OK

So whats the common with troublesome PCs? My thery - VIA chipset. PLE133 on Epia and KT400 on my Athlon's board.

Is there anybody try USB FDD on Epia and other VIA boards? Maybe there is a trick or magic setting on BIOS?

Reply 1 of 7, by debs3759

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I believe the Epia 5000 is only USB 1.1 (according to my document library it's also known as just Epia, and the manual for that says 1.1). Do you know what version is on your Athlon XP motherboard and the laptops? USB 2 is capable of much higher speeds.

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Reply 2 of 7, by weedeewee

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I'm gonna say it's probably the Bios code that isn't optimized for reading from the USB floppy drive on the via epia and the athlon retro pc.

My keyboard also doesn't allow me to type faster when I hook it up to USB3.

edit: you say booting is very slow, but you don't mention reading/writing from the floppy when the system is booted. have you tested this yet ?

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Reply 3 of 7, by serenitatis

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weedeewee wrote on 2021-02-09, 12:15:

but you don't mention reading/writing from the floppy when the system is booted. have you tested this yet ?

Yes. It's also very slow.
P.S. On Athlon PC I have regular floppy drive. And there is no problem with speed. Only with USB FDD.

Reply 4 of 7, by serenitatis

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debs3759 wrote on 2021-02-09, 11:44:

I believe the Epia 5000 is only USB 1.1 (according to my document library it's also known as just Epia, and the manual for that says 1.1). Do you know what version is on your Athlon XP motherboard and the laptops? USB 2 is capable of much higher speeds.

Athlon XP mobo is Albatron KX400-8XV and it's USB 2.0.
Laptops: HP - 1.1, IBM - 2.0.

Reply 5 of 7, by weedeewee

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serenitatis, do you have windows98 or higher or linux on either of the machines to test the usb floppy ? since neither of those should use the bios routines.

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
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Reply 6 of 7, by serenitatis

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weedeewee wrote on 2021-02-09, 14:06:

serenitatis, do you have windows98 or higher or linux on either of the machines to test the usb floppy ? since neither of those should use the bios routines.

Tested on Athlon PC on Windows 98SE and have no speed issues. So this is definitely VIA BIOS problem 🤷‍♂️

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