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AT SS7 ALADDiNV - Low UDMA performance?

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First post, by NeoG_

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I was checking the disk performance of my SS7 AT rig (Motherboard ACORP 5ALI61, M1542/M1543 chipset) and noticed the disk speeds are limited to around 10,500KB/s with high CPU usage. I tried a bunch of things but couldn't seem to increase the performance at all.

  • The SD-to-IDE and Seagate drive both support UDMA (33 and 66 respectively)
  • The SD adapter does about 25MB/s and the HDD does around 35MB/s max when connected to a 440BX board
  • DMA is enabled and stays checked in device manager and in SiSoft Sandra
  • BIOS detects the transfer mode as UDMA Mode 2 with UMDA set to Auto
  • Tried Microsoft, ALI M1543 1.00 and 3.54 bus master IDE drivers, all perform the same
  • Tried Microsoft, ALI M1542 GART 1.20 and 1.65e drivers, all perform the same
  • Fresh install of windows 98 with all cards removed and just enough drivers to enable DMA, still capped
  • With only a single IDE device on primary master or secondary master, speed cap remains

Is this just how fast the IDE controller is on this chipset? Can anyone with an ALADDiNV board confirm what the IDE speed maxes out at?

98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6800, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer

Reply 1 of 1, by NeoG_

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I tried an SIL0680 PCI IDE controller and disabled the onboard IDE controller. The speeds came back as 25MB/s for the SD card and 30MB/s for the HDD which is more in line with expectations. I can also feel the system is less "blocked" by storage reads/writes. For example if I click the start menu while the ATTO test is running, with the onboard controller the start menu doesn't open until the benchmark switches phases or ends. With the SIL0680 the start menu opens straight away (albeit with a bit of animation lag due to the test running).

So it seems like the onboard controller just isn't very good, or it's broken in some way.

98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6800, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer

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