maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-12, 21:32:

what controller type did you have selected in the XTIDE config utility?

Pretty sure was 16-bit isa/vlb/pci ide
If I enable 32 bit transfer in my bios, it doesnt recognise any of my disks so presume my controller is 16bit.

did you have interrupts enabled? I get much better performance out of XUB with interrupt disabled

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-12, 23:07:

did you have interrupts enabled? I get much better performance out of XUB with interrupt disabled

Hmm, not sure. Think I either autoconfigured or used the default settings.

Think I'll get a second EEPROM and have a play with the options!

Presume that, in theory if bios shadowing is on, there shouldnt be much of a performace hit using XTIDE?

Think I've solved it - was using a very old binary of XTIDE bios. This problem was corrected in later revisions which I then found here:
http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/binaries/r602/

I used the ide_386l.bin and configured that.

Now the freezing issues are gone. The speed on benchmarks is marginally lower than using the system bios but not enough to matter and the convenience of it just detecting all the drive geometry automatically without having to set it manually each time (as you do for my motherboard bios) makes it worth it!