You will likely have to use a software overly for a 160gb IDE drive with it, or get a PCI ATA\100\133 controller.
Onboard ata\66 controllers can rarely see drives that large without one.

AlphaWing wrote:

You will likely have to use a software overly for a 160gb IDE drive with it, or get a PCI ATA\100\133 controller.
Onboard ata\66 controllers can rarely see drives that large without one.

The limit is 128GB correct? What would a decent single platter 120GB be then?

Also, if I DID use a PCI controller would it be any faster over the onboard?

You can use a 160GB. Just use whatever space the motherboard detects.

Ultra DMA 66 is a bit of a bottleneck for a modern-ish drive but it isn't going to be terribly noticeable.

Depends on the bios but most onboard ATA/66 will see up to 128gb in my experience.
Depends on the controller really if its faster or not.
You probably won't be able to tell the diff tho not with just a single hard-drive, a software overlay is fine to make full use of the drive, but you gotta make sure the drive is segmented into 80gb or less partitions for 9x that way.
I'd go with 40gb and less partitions to be safe.

You won't have that issue with a PCI controller tho with any size partitions except when installing 9x as long as 9x is on its own 40gb or less partition.
I've had zero file corruption on PCI controllers with large fat32 partitions that are not the boot partition with 9x, an issue you can encounter with onboard controllers.

You can get around 9x's inane scandisk during setup with the Setup /IS command for large partitions.

I actually prefer to avoid PCI IDE/SATA cards because adding extra PCI cards just increases the chances of PCI device conflicts/weirdness.

The bigger question is "Will it bus master?"

I don't know if it's the norm for these type of boards, but my GA-6VXD7 is running a 160GB drive and detects the full capacity from the onboard ports. I suppose it's at the time frame where for many of these boards, a BIOS flash would be required but available.

An ATA100 PCI card might be a little faster with newer drives, but for most drives it probably wouldn't make much difference. But hey, if you mess with old computers very much you either already have, or might as well buy, an ATA100/133 card that can lay around and try out things like this. They're dirt cheap 2nd hand.

If you're sensitive to I/O, be aware that VIA's PCI performance was considered a weakness back then. On the assumption that this is true, a dual CPU VIA board would be better for computation loads than for I/O intensive applications.
Also, the southbridge is connected through PCI (as is typical for that era) so there's no way to keep your disks from hitting the PCI bus.

If it's a Seagate, and you don't NEED the full capacity, try using SeaTools to turn the drive into a 32 GB drive. I do this with modern 2 TB SATA drives. They work flawless on Socket 7, Slot 1, Socket 370 systems through a IDE to SATA adapter.

I did use PCI SATA cards in the past but now I use the above method for all my setups. Performance is fantastic:

Benchmark and images on my site: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/pentium-iii-s … nce-system.html

Sadly, using Seagate HDDs is a bit risky due to questionable reliability. 😒

Firtasik wrote:

Sadly, using Seagate HDDs is a bit risky due to questionable reliability. 😒

While I don't share your experiences, the good news is that SeaTools should also work on Maxtor and Samsung hard drives! I have a Samsung 2 TB desktop drive as well as a Samsung 1 TB notebook drive and SeaTools works fine 😀

This is because actually bought samsung hdd department and maxtor over the past years. 😜

GeorgeMan wrote:

This is because actually bought samsung hdd department and maxtor over the past years. 😜

Yes that's correct 😀

I've personally only had positive experiences with Seagate drives. They've been some of the most stable and problem free drives I've had. Quantum used to die at the drop of a pin, and I've had a severe failure from WD losing me gigabytes of data.

During the last years I've owned and used MANY MANY old hard drives, most from the 1-4GB era, UDMA2 enabled.
Some were fast, some slow but this was never a problem. From what I've experienced from the drives that failed, there is no "good manufacturer" or "seagate drives fail".
EVERY make has some failure rate, Quantum, Seagate, Maxtor, WD and others. Look often at the SMART data of your drives and when even the slightest thing happens, backup everything you need, if you haven't already.

Actually, I'm still searching for a tool like MHDD that works on non-LBA old and small hard disks and tests each sector of the hdd thoroughly, together with display of access time of each one and speed. But I haven't found anything...