Have you tried any available drivers for the "FastTrak S150 TX4" with your card - what Promise sometimes refer to as a 'Lite' version of a card means that the onboard BIOS is restricted to the number of SATA ports/ RAID level which is supported, so in your case perhaps you'll only be able to add 2 of 4 ports to a RAID array and will be limited to RAID 0, with the other 2 ports typically working as single SATA.

I've already edited the .INF file for the Win98-ME drivers to add the SX4 Lite to it.. based on the HP 2k/XP driver pack for the SX4 Lite and a few other cards including some TX cards.

Just waiting to hear back to see if it works or not.

The SX4-M and SX4000 cards use a completely different chip and will not work with modded 98-ME drivers.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-05, 05:12:

I've already edited the .INF file for the Win98-ME drivers to add the SX4 Lite to it.. based on the HP 2k/XP driver pack for the SX4 Lite and a few other cards including some TX cards.

Just waiting to hear back to see if it works or not.

The SX4-M and SX4000 cards use a completely different chip and will not work with modded 98-ME drivers.

Just tried the modified driver and Windows can recognize the controller car now, but it does not improve the performance at all.

The AATO benchmark result is even worse than no driver.

Xeen wrote on 2020-08-05, 12:56:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-05, 05:12:

I've already edited the .INF file for the Win98-ME drivers to add the SX4 Lite to it.. based on the HP 2k/XP driver pack for the SX4 Lite and a few other cards including some TX cards.

Just waiting to hear back to see if it works or not.

The SX4-M and SX4000 cards use a completely different chip and will not work with modded 98-ME drivers.

Just tried the modified driver and Windows can recognize the controller car now, but it does not improve the performance at all.

The AATO benchmark result is even worse than no driver.

You should be getting the same speed as you would if booting to real mode dos. Promise TX4 supports UDMA-6 with it's onboard bios (bios extension loaded at bootup). You should get around 90MB/s (limited by PCI bandwidth) without any drivers loaded. Try it with DOS using speedsys benchmark. Without drivers Win9x will just use the cards own bios to access the drive (rename ESDI_506.PDR in SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS dir to ESDI_506.BAK) and benchmark again.

So it actually sees the controller properly.. no error in device manager? That is good at least.

Are there any options in the driver settings?

My guess is that write and read caching may be disabled by default with the Promise driver.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-05, 13:27:

So it actually sees the controller properly.. no error in device manager? That is good at least.

Are there any options in the driver settings?

My guess is that write and read caching may be disabled by default with the Promise driver.

Yes, it sees the controller card, but the strange thing is in the device manager there is only Floppy Disk showing up under disk drives.

There are no options for driver.

AvalonH wrote on 2020-08-05, 13:17:

You should be getting the same speed as you would if booting to real mode dos. Promise TX4 supports UDMA-6 with it's onboard bios (bios extension loaded at bootup). You should get around 90MB/s (limited by PCI bandwidth) without any drivers loaded. Try it with DOS using speedsys benchmark. Without drivers Win9x will just use the cards own bios to access the drive (rename ESDI_506.PDR in SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS dir to ESDI_506.BAK) and benchmark again.

Here is the test result in DOS.

Can you elaborate more about (rename ESDI_506.PDR in SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS dir to ESDI_506.BAK) ?

DOS speeds look just fine.

Device manager not seeing the drives hooked up to a controller with its own BIOS is normal since the card takes care of everything.

You will normally maybe just see something else related to the card.

How do you have the drive set up in the card's BIOS? Are there any options related to read or write caching?

You may also want to mess with the PCI latency settings in the BIOS. Is the card sharing an IRQ with anything else? Try to put it in a slot that is not sharing an IRQ if possible... if not possible, make sure it is not in a slot that shares the IRQ with USB.

Xeen wrote on 2020-08-05, 13:48:

Here is the test result in DOS.

Can you elaborate more about (rename ESDI_506.PDR in SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS dir to ESDI_506.BAK) ?

Boot straight to Dos. Go to the Windows\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS directory and rename ESDI_506.PDR to ESDI_506.BAK.
Restart and boot to windows, run atto again check if the speed has increased. If not boot back to DOS and rename it back to ESDI_506.PDR.
The above will only make a difference if Under Control Panel/System/Performance it shows "Drive C is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system".

Your using a HD and not a SSD I assume. If you are using a HD those speeds are good in dos and should be the same in atto, not slower.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-05, 14:38:

DOS speeds look just fine. […]
Show full quote

DOS speeds look just fine.

Device manager not seeing the drives hooked up to a controller with its own BIOS is normal since the card takes care of everything.

You will normally maybe just see something else related to the card.

How do you have the drive set up in the card's BIOS? Are there any options related to read or write caching?

You may also want to mess with the PCI latency settings in the BIOS. Is the card sharing an IRQ with anything else? Try to put it in a slot that is not sharing an IRQ if possible... if not possible, make sure it is not in a slot that shares the IRQ with USB.

The only option in card's BIOS is this.

Then I switch to this 3512A non-RAID controller card in the same PCI slot and keep everything as is.

Tested ATTO on the same drive and I can see hard drive name in the device manager.

AvalonH wrote on 2020-08-05, 17:34:

Boot straight to Dos. Go to the Windows\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS directory and rename ESDI_506.PDR to ESDI_506.BAK. Restart and boot to w […]
Show full quote

Xeen wrote on 2020-08-05, 13:48:

Here is the test result in DOS.

Can you elaborate more about (rename ESDI_506.PDR in SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS dir to ESDI_506.BAK) ?

Boot straight to Dos. Go to the Windows\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS directory and rename ESDI_506.PDR to ESDI_506.BAK.
Restart and boot to windows, run atto again check if the speed has increased. If not boot back to DOS and rename it back to ESDI_506.PDR.
The above will only make a difference if Under Control Panel/System/Performance it shows "Drive C is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system".

Your using a HD and not a SSD I assume. If you are using a HD those speeds are good in dos and should be the same in atto, not slower.

Let me try it then get back.

Yeah.. something is weird about that particulare Promise controller performance-wise though it is normal with a RAID controller to not see the drive in device manager because when the controller sets it up, it sets it up as a RAID volume which the OS doesn't see as a physical piece of hardware.

Maybe the performance issue is partly why they never made Win9x drivers for that series of cards... Or maybe it is a weird raid bios issue...

The other thing I noticed is that "Sample" sticker on the back of the card. Maybe it is a pre-production unit and that is why it has issues.

I really wonder if it is the same as a TX4 but just with a different BIOS.

Today, I take two 4TB drives and create a mirror array (install Win98SE on 80GB partition).

The performance is the as bad as yesterday then I tried ESDI_506.PDR trick and it does not help either.

Did you check for any irq or resource conflicts? And have you tried the card in a different slot or with a different system?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-06, 14:13:

Did you check for any irq or resource conflicts? And have you tried the card in a different slot or with a different system?

I think it has nothing to do with slots because the other card work great and I can even boot from the DVD-ROM connected to it after flashing the latest BISO.

As for the mystery Promise card, I also tried those BIOS and none of them can work.

Did you backup the original bios first?

I really think that the card you got must be some sort of pre-production card going by the "sample" sticker on the back.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-07, 13:40:

Did you backup the original bios first?

I really think that the card you got must be some sort of pre-production card going by the "sample" sticker on the back.

I did not, but don’t worry none of those can flash the card.

I recently picked up a FastTrak S150 SX4 (no "Lite"),

Win98 was installed without issues to a JBOD drive, but booting up performance is slow with some blue screens, power cycling the computer seem to fix it though.
Unfortunately there is no Win98 driver under "FastTrak S150 SX4" @ https://www.promise.com/support/downloadcenter ..
Was there a modified Win98 driver for this card? Can anyone share it?

These cards have a DIMM socket for SDRAM, used as a drive cache, and a 512MB module tested OK on all tests with "Promise Memory Test Utility v1.3".

I dumped the BIOS with pflash.exe and attached it, version 2.0.0.3 if anyone has a use for it.
Next I'll upgrade the BIOS and see what happens then!

No problem updating the BIOS to version 2.0.70.24, however, since I had (erroneously) installed TX series drivers, Win98 now hangs during start.
It booted up fully with the old BIOS just as non functional PCI in device manager, lesson learned I guess.

Booting to safe mode the following is displayed:

"While initializing device IOS:
Error: An I/O subsystem driver failed to load.
Either a file in the .\iosubsys subdirectory is corrupt,
or the system is low on memory."

I did remove 256MB + 128MB host RAM modules before trying this..

I deleted the partition and started over, Win98 still hangs with the new BIOS.

Conclusion: S150 SX4 is not good in Win98 !
It's probably better suited for a WinXP machine, this goes for other SX series cards too, right?

TX series looks more promising, for Win98 at least, but I'm still waiting for mine to arrive.

I have a S150 TX4 running in my windows 98 build. All OK.

Never tried a SX4 as I could not find windows 9x drivers for it either.