I picked up the second card today, the SATA 300 TX2plus.

It's a little confusing because "FastTrak" variants of these cards have RAID and Win98 drivers, while the non-FastTrak variants are SATA controllers (only) and start support at Windows 2000.

I made a driver floppy using the program from the driver CD, and while it can be installed in Win98, it seems the driver only artificially works, since there really isn't a proper device driver.
As stated by AvalonH, while it's a working device (in device manager) we still see: "Drive C is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system"

So once again, these are more interesting to test in e.g. WinXP where the device has full support. Same as my FastTrak S150 SX4. So look very closely what the different cards support over at https://www.promise.com/support/downloadcenter , or be like me for not doing the research 😀

That means roughly 8MB/s read/write on everything above 4K with ATTO.
I tested renaming ESDI_506.PDR to ESDI_506.BAK, and yes, no change.

My take on this is that the card is still useful, unlike the SX4, I have not seen any blue screens and it seems very solid.
Speed in DOS is pretty good too!

Results with a PNY CS900 SSD:

Kasreyn wrote on 2021-07-28, 11:25:

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!

WARNING: I tried downgrading back to this version. On my Athlon XP that resulted in a blinking cursor after POST, I had bricked the card.
Relocating the card to my Pentium II solved it since it has a different BIOS behavior, it manages to pass the blinking cursor screen, I could then upgrade the card back to normal.

SATA 300 TX2plus works great in KNOPPIX 7.2.
Even though UDMA modes 100/133 are used respectively, these are both limited around 62MB/s.

hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 226 MB in 2.00 seconds = 112.75 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 188 MB in 3.00 seconds = 62.58 MB/sec

hdparm -tT /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 232 MB in 2.01 seconds = 115.28 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 186 MB in 3.00 seconds = 61.98 MB/sec

dmesg:
[ 2.516801] ata3: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 2.517217] ata3.00: FORCE: horkage modified (noncq)
[ 2.517347] ata3.00: ATA-11: PNY CS900 120GB SSD, CS900613, max UDMA/133
[ 2.517372] ata3.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (not used)
[ 2.518008] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 2.530811] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA PNY CS900 120GB CS90 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 2.532848] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 234441648 512-byte logical blocks: (120 GB/111 GiB)
[ 2.533891] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 2.533918] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 2.534212] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 2.537679] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 2.538098] sda: sda1
[ 2.542169] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
..
[ 3.010147] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[ 3.017066] ata4.00: FORCE: horkage modified (noncq)
[ 3.378800] psmouse serio1: bad data from KBC - timeout
[ 3.418023] ata4.00: ATA-8: TOSHIBA MK2555GSX H, FG001Q, max UDMA/100
[ 3.418047] ata4.00: 488397168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (not used)
[ 3.423947] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 3.424806] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA TOSHIBA MK2555GS FG00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 3.427227] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[ 3.427909] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 3.427935] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 3.428229] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 3.428701] input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2
[ 3.432290] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[ 3.483231] sdb: sdb1
[ 3.485960] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk