Reply 20 of 22, by Kasreyn
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: