Hi there!

May I ask if Windows 3.11 has fast access to the HDD?

There's SmartDrive for DOS, which can be tweaked (see status via SmartMon in Windows 3.1x).

Then there's FastDisk (32-Bit Disk Access), the Windows HDD cache (32-Bit File Access)..

If the CF card is 8GB or smaller, the Micro House HDD driver can be installed, too.

http://win31.de/edrivers.htm

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-22, 13:15:

Hi there! […]
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Hi there!

May I ask if Windows 3.11 has fast access to the HDD?

There's SmartDrive for DOS, which can be tweaked (see status via SmartMon in Windows 3.1x).

Then there's FastDisk (32-Bit Disk Access), the Windows HDD cache (32-Bit File Access)..

If the CF card is 8GB or smaller, the Micro House HDD driver can be installed, too.

http://win31.de/edrivers.htm

Interesting - I was actually beginning to think it might be a disk access issue.

I do have Smartdrv loaded at booting time - I remembered back in the day it made quite a bit of difference in terms of performance and Win3.1x usually adds it to the startup files anyway (back in the 90s, I remember a lot of people didn't understand what it did and removed it to free some conventional memory for games - then complained everything crawled 😁 ).

I'll give a try to the one you linked later...the CF is 1GB currently, but I have several more up to 4GB laying around...somewhere...

Thanks!

H3llR4iser wrote on 2023-01-22, 16:52:

Interesting - I was actually beginning to think it might be a disk access issue.

I do have Smartdrv loaded at booting time - I remembered back in the day it made quite a bit of difference in terms of performance and Win3.1x usually adds it to the startup files anyway (back in the 90s, I remember a lot of people didn't understand what it did and removed it to free some conventional memory for games - then complained everything crawled 😁 ).

I'll give a try to the one you linked later...the CF is 1GB currently, but I have several more up to 4GB laying around...somewhere...

It's just an idea, WfW 3.11 can be very fast with the right drivers/hardware. It even outperformed Windows NT, once! 😅

Um, if FastDisk doesn't work, you can try increasing the memory for SmartDrive, too.

If Windows is installed, it's recommend to add SmartDrive in config.sys, too:
device=c:\dos\smartdrv.exe /double_buffer

In autoexec.bat, you can try this setting:
c:\dos\smartdrv /X 4096 4096

This will load SmartDrive with an read-only cache (no delayed writing) and a whoopin' 4096KB (4MB) cache size when in both Windows 3.1x and DOS.
SmartMon, a Windows 3.1 utility, in the C:\DOS directory will help you analyzing the cache usage (if MS-DOS 6.2x is installed).

Um, this is just for testing purposes. You can lower the values, if needed, so applications have more memory.

H3llR4iser wrote on 2023-01-22, 16:52:

Thanks!

You're welcome. ^^

Update - I've tried the FastDisk driver and the various Smartdrive settings...at best I can get about 450 KB/s in download from my NAS. At this point I'm relatively sure it's the Realtek driver that is not playing nice with Win3.11 - and to be honest, the card(s) came out in 1999, I'm even surprised there IS a driver for 16-Bit Windows 😁

I don't think the CF card to be a problem per se (transfers from the optical drive are as fast as expected), but I might give a try with a different one - I'm using a very old PNY CF I had in a drawer for more than a decade, I have a few Transcend laying around (these Transcend 133x cards don't play well with some ISA/VLB I/O controllers, giving continuous write errors - but they work perfectly on the LS-486E's integrated controller, for some reason).

That said, for what I need to transfer (some documents, floppy images, the occasional DOS game), even 450 KB/s are certainly endurable, not much stuff you run on a 486-class machine that's over 50MB in size 😀

I think your speed is about right.

A Pentium III 600, Win98, PCI everything is good for about 6 MB/s FTP.

With my 486/160 I get a bit more than 2 MB/s using Windows 2000 (uncached file). Perhaps I have to change the NIC (lol). My current Intel 10/100 card seems to be a low performer.
From disk cache the magic border is around 4 MB/s.
Re: My 486 UMC8886/8881 Project

Okay, it has a bit more RAM and probably more L2 cache too, but I know that Win9x has much less performance.

In windows 3.11 (486DX33) I've got very good performance with ISA 10MBit SMC UltraChip (83C790QF) - better than when using other ISA ethernet cards, same as with 100MBit RTL8139.
I can do some comparison if you want (unfortunately I don't have fast 486 CPU).

In my EISA 486/50 I get around 14 MBit/s (1,8 MB/s) with a 3com 10/100 EISA NIC. Windows 9x.

No difference with other SD cards. I don't think it's a file transfer issue at this point, copying files from the optical drive is as fast as expected (and certainly faster than I remember it being in the 1990s, then again - CDROMs were NOT 52x at the time...). Copying something like a large .wad file takes a handful of seconds. I'll see if I can find a network card with a different chip somewhere.

SUCCESS!

This was a real headscratcher but I have it nailed, finally - transfer rates as shown by WS_FTP are now in the region of 8-9 Mbps (peaking out at just past 10 occasionally). Not too shabby for a 486 class machine!

In the end it looks like it was a combination of system settings and CF card speeds that created the issue; I managed to acquire a couple different network cards - a 3COM 3C905C and an Intel 82550; The Intel apparently doesn't even have a Win 3.11 driver and the 3COM, while working and initially transferring files a little faster than the RT8139, has a some weird incompatibility with either the SiS496 chipset or the RAM - it was causing random memory corruption issues, to the point either WFW 3.11 would freeze or even HIMEM.SYS would throw an "unreliable memory detected" error at startup.

In the end, looks like I was missing to enable 32-Bit file access (I only had enabled "disk access"); Also, it might be purely a coincidence (I fell prey of the dreaded "change more than one parameter at a time" fault!), but things really sped up once I managed to push all of the Realtime NDIS drivers in the upper memory. For future reference, this is what I did:

1. Use a (possibly) fast CF card; In my case, a Transcend X133 4GB
2. Install the RT8139 drivers in Win 3.11
3. Install the TCP/32 protocols
4. Install the Microhouse 32-Bit disk access driver from here -> http://win31.de/edrivers.htm (Thanks Jo22!)
5. Configure the RT8139 driver to "Real Mode NDIS" (for whatever reason, the enhanced mode driver is slow as hell)
6. Go to Main->Control Panel->386 Enhanced; Click the "Virtual memory" button and enable BOTH 32-Bit disk access and 32-Bit file access
7. In the same screen, set the virtual memory file size to whatever is the suggested amount, and set it as permanent
8. Check the way TSRs are loaded at startup; IFSHLP.SYS loads the actual network driver (In the case of the RT8139, it's called a cryptic "RTSND" - I initially thought this was SoundBlaster related!)
9. Play around with autoexec.bat and config.sys for a few...hours, until you manage to cram almost every TSR in the upper memory (play around with the loading order AND the sector where things are loaded)

I'm not sure steps 8/9 are necessary, but it's what I did anyways.

Now, I should grab some Win 3.1 benchmarks to figure out how much the actual CF card factors in this...

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!