It could be that the BIOS int13h code doesn't take full advantage of trhe UDMA support of the onboard chip, and the onboard BIOS for the Promise card does a better job. To really compare them you should run tests within Windows once all the drivers are installed and DMA is enabled.

Sorry to revive but I have the exact same setup: a sata300 promise card on a S7 system with two "modern" 40gb sata drives connected and an ide cd drive hooked up tonthe pata port of the card. Problem 1: there's no cd drive in Windows 98SE although the card detects it at boot just fine ?

There is no Win9x driver for the SATA II based Promise cards. You will need one of the SATA I -150 based cards if you want full speed in Win9x. There are also SATA II - 150 cards which also do not have drivers for Win9x.

You also will not get the optical drive showing up in Win9x with any of the SATA II cards.

In the end there really isn't any point for the SATA II cards on PCI unless you are RAID-ing them together or running a 66Mhz PCI bus since SATA I has more throughput available than the standard 33Mhz 32-bit PCI bus does.

Wow... this is really weird timing. I was just thinking about booting from a SATA card for one of my tester systems rather than using a convoluted series of adapters. In the end it'll probably still boot faster (the most important thing for a tester) without having to load a SATA card's BIOS, but it is very good to know that the actual transfer rate increase may be HUGE.

cyclone3d wrote:

There is no Win9x driver for the SATA II based Promise cards. You will need one of the SATA I -150 based cards if you want full speed in Win9x. There are also SATA II - 150 cards which also do not have drivers for Win9x.

You also will not get the optical drive showing up in Win9x with any of the SATA II cards.

In the end there really isn't any point for the SATA II cards on PCI unless you are RAID-ing them together or running a 66Mhz PCI bus since SATA I has more throughput available than the standard 33Mhz 32-bit PCI bus does.

The intent was not speed, but just having sata connectivity and an additional modern IDE. Drivers install fine, but am not sure they bring any benefit to the table..

The OP claims to have been able to access the cf card on the ide channel, although in native DOS mode. I wonder how ?

AzzKickr wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

There is no Win9x driver for the SATA II based Promise cards. You will need one of the SATA I -150 based cards if you want full speed in Win9x. There are also SATA II - 150 cards which also do not have drivers for Win9x.

You also will not get the optical drive showing up in Win9x with any of the SATA II cards.

In the end there really isn't any point for the SATA II cards on PCI unless you are RAID-ing them together or running a 66Mhz PCI bus since SATA I has more throughput available than the standard 33Mhz 32-bit PCI bus does.

The intent was not speed, but just having sata connectivity and an additional modern IDE. Drivers install fine, but am not sure they bring any benefit to the table..

What driver version? I was never able to find any for the Promise SATA II cards that work in Win9x. And Promise also doesn't claim compatibility with Win9x with their SATA II cards.

Could you upload the driver here if it isn't too big? If it is too big, then upload it to something like Google Drive and post a link here.

Don't know which specific revision I'm on now, but all Sata II 150 - 300 TX cards have Win9x compat.

Here's my Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ptka1gx9xaq1qmg/AA … Wsvk1H-gna?dl=0

The thing is though; I'm not sure they add any benefit. The system works just fine with the controller still as "unknown mass storage device" in device manager.

AzzKickr wrote on 2019-03-31, 09:58:

The thing is though; I'm not sure they add any benefit. The system works just fine with the controller still as "unknown mass storage device" in device manager.

so to clarify with the drivers you linked above windows 98 will show the correct hardware under device manager? but it also works fine without them showing just a unknown device?

I need to know asap cause I'm about to buy one of these and want to know if it works on window 98

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-01-16, 01:17:

so to clarify with the drivers you linked above windows 98 will show the correct hardware under device manager? but it also works fine without them showing just a unknown device?
I need to know asap cause I'm about to buy one of these and want to know if it works on window 98

I tested SATA 300 TX2plus in Win98, linked drivers in this thread look the same as "1.00.0.31 1.00.0.33 1.00.0.39" on Promise's site https://www.promise.com/support/downloadcenter
None of these mention Windows 98 support !

You have to look under SATA -> "SATA300 HBA Series" and find "SATA300 TX2 Plus". Don't be confused (like I was) and look under FastTrak, there's TX2plus but that's S150 !
The S150 driver installs just fine (despite being the wrong driver), no errors in device manager, but the drive will end up in DOS compatibility mode !

The SATA300 driver installs with warning ! "This device is not present, is not working properly, or does not have all its drivers installed (Code 10)".
It will be in the same DOS compatibility mode (if you use Win98). No drives will populate in device manager but connected HDDs work just fine in DOS.

On my Pentium 2 this means a limit of about 8MB/s but with the benefit of very fast random reads (SSD). On the plus side it doesn't have the same blue screens I could see with SX4.
But yeah, you can be better off using the onboard IDE with SATA adapter where speeds can reach roughly 30MB/s (e.g. UDMA 33 as found on 440BX).

How does it perform with proper drivers then? Well, I tested sequential read/write using dd (KNOPPIX v9.1) and got roughly 20MB/s when using a block size of 4096.

So I think the answer is, just use one of these:

I have messed around with sata cards in some of my retro builds, except that I prefer to run Windows 95c.
There are no drivers that work for any Promise sata card in win95 that I could find.

My work around was to use a Promise PCI IDE133 card, which does have win95 drivers, then plug in a CF adapter directly into the IDE slot of the card.
This works fine, but watch the size of the CF drive you use.
I just picked up some IDE to SATA red adapters, that I can plug into the Promise IDE card, but havent tested them yet.

My Dell Dimension XPS M200s (430VX chipset P200mmx) locks up with any CF cards larger than 8gb, in the onboard IDE, or in the Promise card.

My Micron Millennia big tower (intel 440BX-2 motherboard PII-400) system handles 8gb CF cards fine in its onboard IDE or Promise PCI card.
A 32gb CF card locks the bios in the onboard socket, while working fine in the Promise card with its newer bios.
I'm not sure if the lockups are caused by the size of the CF card, of if because its so much newer, its somehow not compatible with the onboard bios.
The motherboards are using their final bios revisions, and the CF card is a Lexar x1066 type.

WinXP definitely is the better choice for a TX2plus. It raises the bar from UDMA 33 to about UDMA 100 on a 440BX !
Since it adds SATA, why not dual boot? Win98 can live on IDE while WinXP lives on SATA.
Boot into WinXP for fast (around 10MB/s) transfers, however, my 450 MHz CPU is bottlenecking transfers to about 100 Mbit so remove that Gbit NIC and save a PCI slot !

Strangely this card works best in Pentium II, I could not reach the same speeds on my Athlon XP machine.

A modern SSD increases performance for small files too, so this card has my recommendation.

SATA to IDE adapter ( limited to UDMA 33 by 440BX) + SATA HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS)

TX2plus SATA + PNY CS900 SSD

I ended up trying a bunch of storage options (like a lot!) it ended up that a promise sata II tx4 300 with a SSD not only was the fastest option it also solved a lot of booting issues and worked great with windows ME and 7 on a k6-3+ and pentium MMX and 430tx/hx chipset

I even tested a m.2 nvme on a pci to pcie adapter. the mentioned card is where it's at for retro upgrades.

My experiences with such cards is quite mixed. The Promise SATA 150 was the better built card compared to others common ones but the only reason to use them was to use a SSD disk without one the the many cheap adapters that might be more compatible but with their problems. Just looking at the one above attached, it's clear what's going to happen after a while moving around cables in the case. I had different IDE to SATA adapters (or the opposite) and the ones that worked (some didn't) was stressed on the connector solder points. One adapter ended up burning my PSU cables for who know eletric problems probably for the above reasons. So I'd use an adapter only if separated from both the mainboard and disk using two cables and with a stable and safe mount case position.
The PCI controllers instead were good but W9x had problems of corrupting data after a while sometimes, others I had problems with the DVD drive cause most of these seems not built for any CD/DVD bios booting even when with their own bios.

AzzKickr wrote on 2019-03-31, 09:57:

Don't know which specific revision I'm on now, but all Sata II 150 - 300 TX cards have Win9x compat.

Here's my Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ptka1gx9xaq1qmg/AA … Wsvk1H-gna?dl=0

Thank you for the download, the link still works fine in 2022!

While i would agree with the naysayer crowd that getting a Promise SATA1 150 generation card, that have official Win9x support out of the box, may be the best choice, but 20 years after the fact we use what we can..

And from the bunch of potential candidates (Silicon Image 3112/3114, 3132, 3512 and their LEGION of noname devices, straight up crapware VIA VT6421A and variations of it that filled PC shops around 2004, a load of PCI/PCI-X professional S-ATA RAID cards that work great under Win2K/XP/Linux but were never even intended to work under DOS/Win9x) 2nd generation Promise TX2/TX4 (and NOT NT only SX cards!) S-ATA cards should rate really really high on retro system builders to get lists. 😀

cskamacska wrote on 2022-06-05, 04:04:

Thank you for the download, the link still works fine in 2022! […]
Show full quote

AzzKickr wrote on 2019-03-31, 09:57:

Don't know which specific revision I'm on now, but all Sata II 150 - 300 TX cards have Win9x compat.

Here's my Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ptka1gx9xaq1qmg/AA … Wsvk1H-gna?dl=0

Thank you for the download, the link still works fine in 2022!

While i would agree with the naysayer crowd that getting a Promise SATA1 150 generation card, that have official Win9x support out of the box, may be the best choice, but 20 years after the fact we use what we can..

And from the bunch of potential candidates (Silicon Image 3112/3114, 3132, 3512 and their LEGION of noname devices, straight up crapware VIA VT6421A and variations of it that filled PC shops around 2004, a load of PCI/PCI-X professional S-ATA RAID cards that work great under Win2K/XP/Linux but were never even intended to work under DOS/Win9x) 2nd generation Promise TX2/TX4 (and NOT NT only SX cards!) S-ATA cards should rate really really high on retro system builders to get lists. 😀

I have used my tx4 sata II with 9x/me

See if the right driver is here
download/file.php?id=138591

These are drivers I uploded to another post. Report back of they work