When building our 120MHz 486 back in the '90s, we had a choice between PCI and VLB and unfortunately chose VLB. The VLB cards we had for it were a CMD 0640 IDE controller (infamous in the Linux world for a data corruption bug) and a video card (from Diamond maybe?)

Also, you probably shouldn't set powered electronics on bubblewrap or anti-static bags, it could short out the components if you're unlucky.

HunterZ wrote:

Also, you probably shouldn't set powered electronics on bubblewrap or anti-static bags, it could short out the components if you're unlucky.

I wonder how many pictures rg100 has posted with nobody pointing that out. I didn't know it was an issue, I have used AS bags as makeshift testing benchs before without issue. 😕

Well, I don't know what sort of conductive properties the pink bubblewrap/foam has, so I can't really comment on that.

But as far as using the metallized antistatic bags, there is a bit of a risk involved, yes. Usually those bags are designed such that the conductive layer is on the inside or sandwiched in between layers of plastic. So laying something down on the outside of the bag normally shouldn't cause an issue. The problem comes from the spiky bits of solder and component legs sticking through the board... if the outer layer of the bag gets punctured by some of those, you could end up having continuity between things that shouldn't have continuity.

If you're going to be using parts outside a case, really the safest thing to do is set 'em straight onto a wooden table/workbench/scrap of plywood.

Re: using bubblewrap as a base for a "live" testing environment - that's a shock and a surprise! I've tested quite a few mobos on it to date, and haven't been aware of anything specifically going wrong because of it. But having said that, I'm still tempted to get rid of it - just to be on the safe side.

The pink stuff should be OK

the only problem with plastic like that would be the likelihood of static buildup.

Honestly it doesn't worry me much though. I have bad static problems at home with my plastic folding tables + plastic floor mat over carpet. I've been shooting lightning bolts into one of my PCs for years now. Sometimes it freaks out the USB ports momentarily. 😀

swaaye wrote:

the only problem with plastic like that would be the likelihood of static buildup.

Isn't the pink bubblewrap anti-static? I thought that's why ebay sellers used it for shipping IT components.

hmmmmmm

the silver bags are, like said above, highly conductive. The pink bubblewrap is too to some degree if it's anti-static.

swaaye wrote:

the silver bags are, like said above, very conductive. The pink bubblewrap is too to some degree if it's anti-static.

Ah I see! If it's anti-static, then it's conductive, which is bad. Maybe I should remove it from my "work bench" (up-turned cardboard box!)

plain cardboard is a great insulator.

So is the CF card a noticeable speed bottleneck for the 486?

swaaye wrote:

So is the CF card a noticeable speed bottleneck for the 486?

This mobo's been removed from my workbench (cardboard box). But it's still to hand. I could easily plug it back in, and run some tests. What's the best way to determine if the CF card is a speed bottleneck?

I'm constantly changing retro hardware configurations because I like messing about with this stuff. And when I get this stuff from ebay, it all gets tested so I know what works and what doesn't - eventually I'll pick out the best bits and case them all up. From the early 90s era, I'm aiming to build two 486 machines, and any other bits and pieces will be handy spares.

I'm just wondering if it seemed sluggish with respect to file access. I'm not looking for benchmark results specifically, instead more of a HDD vs CF subjective opinion. 😀

What I'm most curious about is how awful the writes are. Flash memory has horrible write performance most of the time and this is not good at all for a system that needs to frequently perform small writes randomly.

Copying a file (to the same drive) in DOS is about 1.8MB/second on my 1GB Sandisk CF card on a 486-100.

That's not unlike the crusty hard drives from those days so it probably isn't a big deal. And the read speeds are probably better than most hard drives. The access times definitely should be.

Access time 0,3ms and transfer rate 3.1MB/s on that computer. Transfer rate can get like twice as fast on a faster computer.

swaaye wrote:

Flash memory has horrible write performance most of the time and this is not good at all for a system that needs to frequently perform small writes randomly.

Would CF be OK for OSes like DOS and WFWG? How about Windows 95 - for playing games circa mid 90s?

Well I have an EeePC 900 which runs two SSDs, a 4GB and a 16GB. The 4GB is fairly fast but writes really bog it down. For example, when you boot into XP on there, there are lots of writes happening for various reasons and it can and does cause the whole system to "pause" momentarily while the SSD catches up.

The 16GB SSD is much slower. Writes are so slow on it that I would consider it not that much faster than a floppy drive sometimes. Small file writes only happen at about 500KB/s. For reads it's as fast as 8 year old HDDs (~30MB/s).

There's a free caching driver that someone developed to help with this. It's called FlashFire. It dramatically improved the usability of my EeePC flash SSDs. Basically it is a large write behind cache that allows more writes to happen in the background than with a typical OS write cache. There are data loss risks with a large write behind cache though, and if you cause too many writes in a short period of time, it will fill up and the improvement is gone.

That's very interesting. I was thinking of replacing my main HDD on my main WinXP machine because it keeps "chattering and grinding", and irratates me a bit. (For some strange reason, it's much noisier in the evenings.) I was hoping to get a 64GB SSD - that should be enough. But if these things are slow, maybe I should investigate the HDD (a fairly new 500GB Western Digital "green" WD5000AACS), to see if it's either faulty or "clashing/fighting" with a background process inside WinXP? When I bought it last year, it was almost silent. Now, it's my noisiest component.