hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-01-20, 23:25:

luckybob wrote on 2020-01-20, 20:02:

That said, if your system has PCI, you should use SATA and be done with it.

Again, stop with this "recomendation". SATA is a no go in older pre-Pentium3 platforms, except maybe if you are lucky to get one of these Promise SATA controllers with the first revisions of the chip (And even these will not work in PCI slots found in 486/Pentium 90 boards and less). Newer ones need features only present in PCI versions 2.2/3 and up (Pentium 4+ PCI chipsets).

Just because a board has PCI slots doesn't mean will be compatible with all PCI cards, specially for newer SATA and USB2 controller hardware.

With all due respect, pound sand.

All you said was "dont buy the cheap Chinese sata cards" which is a valid criticism, in ANY event.

I use an Ali based PCI SATA+PATA card on my i420EX based board and a SIL3112 SATA card on another 486 board, both working without any headaches, and also on 50MHz PCI.

Tiido wrote on 2020-01-21, 00:05:

I use an Ali based PCI SATA+PATA card on my i420EX based board and a SIL3112 SATA card on another 486 board, both working without any headaches, and also on 50MHz PCI.

Your mileage doesn't seem to be the general rule, as has been shown in this forum frequent posts about incompatibilities of modern PCI cards running in old board PCI slots. Also doesn't seem easy to find high quality ALi SATA cards with the right revision of the ALi chip that works in older PCI revisions. The same can be said of Silicon Image cards, there are many that have problems even in new P4+ boards because them were bad wired or the BIOS included with them was bogus. And finally, unlike PCI SCSI cards (of the era ofc, not the more modern PCIX ones), these SATA controllers don't have proper Win3x FASTDISK (*.386 VxD) drivers or Win95/98 PDR miniports (Silicon Image cards have PDRs for Win9x, but these only work in combination with certain BIOS revisions, well known problem of the old transition days between Win98 and XP), so you will have to operate them in INT13H downgraded mode under these OSs. It can be a problem depending what you pretend to do with the card.

Once I have changed the BIOS to right revision on the SIL311x/351x cards all problems disappear (at least in 9x, no clue about NT, 2K, XP and newer), though it could be difficult since the flashing util doesn't support the chips on the cheapest cards one can buy and I have had to change the chip to something the card supports and then flash (otherwise it seems RAID function won't work, card is seed as a non-RAID thing). Win3.x is limited to real mode INT13 access though, there are no drivers to use.
ALi M5283 based things have always worked out of box without any BIOS or driver issues on 9x. No clue about NT, 2K, XP and newer. No Win3.x drivers exist either.
Only time I had a card not work was when I used a video card with a BIOS larger than 32KB on a Pentium1 machine, then the system BIOS couldn't boot the RAID card BIOS for some reason...