Where the bus speeds are low the bandwidth is narrow but a RAID can seek quicker.
VLB is just PCI in reverse they realised its true potentul is why it became PCI instead (and to satisfy the critics saying VLB wasn't true 32bit.)
I had VLB graphics card CIRRUS LOGIC and 4 IDEport card back in 2006 it supplied true colour and good data seeking performance I would love to see a vlb and PCI motherboard but there isn't
I think its because VLB could be called the first 32 bit bus and PCI was the winning design.
Perhaps there was a VLB RAID solution but where the disks are these days would be hens teeth and even smallish flash drives that could run together with adapters for IDE.
SATA would be double the front side bus speed needed to run so the old motherboard wouldn't be able to function without freezing the graphics stuttering the sound and generally beng completely challenged.

luckybob wrote on 2021-07-08, 23:02:

Once you have the option for sata, that should be the only choice. Its CHEAP, fast, and easy. Like my ex.

Always said your ex was kinda SASsy 😜

cyberluke wrote on 2021-06-29, 15:17:

Ah, I guess simple solution is SCSI2SD by Michael McMaster: https://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD and use SD card instead of SSD.

This is what I would do if your dead keen on going with SCSI but have you tired the IDE/CF card option. Usually that's enough performance boost for dos based rigs and alot cheaper.
I run SCSI on my rigs that have it onboard but it's only for fun and still use spinning rust. It's hard to recommend for any practical reason much like SAS. They are both dead end expensive options vs IDE or SATA.

Thank you. I would like to overcome the limitations of old IDE ATA on 386, 486 and Pentium MMX machines. None of them has UDMA support.

1) ISA: I found EIDE (enhanced IDE) controller for ISA on AliExpress and ordered one to try it
2) PCI: I ordered IDE RAID (Ultra ATA) controller for Pentium MMX
3) VLB: 486 has only ISA and VLB => I would try some SCSI for VLB probably

Then the next step is CF to IDE adapter or SD to IDE adapter, of course - if we talk about IDE, not SCSI. I already have both. But I would like to overcome the bottleneck of onboard IDE ATA controllers.

In 386DX 40MHz it does not have any onboard controller. It had some cheap ISA controller. I have replaced it with GSI Model 21, which I use also for Gotek FlashFloppy and 2.88MB floppy drive (just fixed the bug in FlashFloppy firmware yesterday, it is on Github in Issues). This GSI Model 21 is using SD2IDE adapter already. Documentation for this controller says it has some form of IDE accelerator. I guess it means it has DMA support and something like bulk data transfer support.

From what I read and discovered, SD card for IDE will already offer zero seek times. And on 386 there will be no additional speedup when moving to SCSI because ISA or CPU/motherboard chipset will be probably the bottleneck for data transfers.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-09, 05:30:

I think its because VLB could be called the first 32 bit bus and PCI was the winning design.

I'm sorry, I have to contradict you.
Well, there were concurring local buses at this time. Opti/Orchid local bus and other proprietary local buses. The VLB thing came from VESA to get a common design. But they all are cheap local 486 buses. However, some designs work with 386 too.
And EISA of course was a 32 bit bus that was much earlier than VLB or PCI.
But I've never seen a PCI design for a 386 CPU...

Disruptor wrote on 2021-07-09, 18:40:

I'm sorry, I have to contradict you. Well, there were concurring local buses at this time. Opti/Orchid local bus and other propr […]
Show full quote

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-09, 05:30:

I think its because VLB could be called the first 32 bit bus and PCI was the winning design.

I'm sorry, I have to contradict you.
Well, there were concurring local buses at this time. Opti/Orchid local bus and other proprietary local buses. The VLB thing came from VESA to get a common design. But they all are cheap local 486 buses. However, some designs work with 386 too.
And EISA of course was a 32 bit bus that was much earlier than VLB or PCI.
But I've never seen a PCI design for a 386 CPU...

Probably find it on wikipedia if I was bored😀
today i was dumbfounded to see VLB and PCI on the same AT Motherboard I didn't think such creature existed, having built in IDE and floppy, i think i'd ignore the VLB in favor of PCI unless I only had VLB / Vesa video card (laggy yuk)
My old VLB disk controller setup had 2 IDE ports and i had WD Caviar 250mb disks on both and on my dx33 machine i ran windows 95. With 16mb ram,2mb CIRRUS LOGIC vlb GPU I had swapfile running on one disk whilst the O.S. ran on the other. Responsiveness was greatly improved. I dub it poor mans SCSI because i didnt have the money for highest level tech but seriously if it wasn't a big server SCSI was just a con for desktop use because there wasn't the FSB speed to keep it up at full throughput efficiency (like gigabit lan on 32bit compared to PCI-X version). The best to hope for was multiple IDE disks one for system, one for swap and one for games. That was closest to RAID in those days being mid 90's I hadn't heard of RAID back then anyhow. I remember my frustration trying sound recorder to dub compact disc tracks into the pc but the proper bitrate uncompressed said out of memory error if only mp3's were around for free in 1996 the pc wouldn't had been just a geek toy with a few shareware games like cat splat 🤣

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

Probably find it on wikipedia if I was bored😀

Well, I've altered some information on German Wikipedia SCSI page.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

today i was dumbfounded to see VLB and PCI on the same AT Motherboard I didn't think such creature existed, having built in IDE and floppy, i think i'd ignore the VLB in favor of PCI unless I only had VLB / Vesa video card (laggy yuk)

Yes, my ASUS PVI 486 SP3 has PCI, VLB and ISA.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

My old VLB disk controller setup had 2 IDE ports and i had WD Caviar 250mb disks on both and on my dx33 machine i ran windows 95. With 16mb ram,2mb CIRRUS LOGIC vlb GPU I had swapfile running on one disk whilst the O.S. ran on the other. Responsiveness was greatly improved...

That was a common trick.
I had SCSI wired to the yellow LED and IDE to the red LED, so activity on the red LED was one of the out of memory indicators on my system...

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

I remember my frustration trying sound recorder to dub compact disc tracks into the pc but the proper bitrate uncompressed said out of memory error if only mp3's were around for free in 1996 the pc wouldn't had been just a geek toy with a few shareware games like cat splat 🤣

Well, my cousin did it this way. He had an 8x Plextor Caddy SCSI CDROM in his Pentium 133.
Once I've purchased my UltraPlex SCSI I gave him a copy of the PlexTools disc. With its PlexManager he could create digital duplicates in 8x speed.

Disruptor wrote on 2021-07-11, 16:15:

Well, I've altered some information on German Wikipedia SCSI page. […]
Show full quote

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

Probably find it on wikipedia if I was bored😀

Well, I've altered some information on German Wikipedia SCSI page.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

today i was dumbfounded to see VLB and PCI on the same AT Motherboard I didn't think such creature existed, having built in IDE and floppy, i think i'd ignore the VLB in favor of PCI unless I only had VLB / Vesa video card (laggy yuk)

Yes, my ASUS PVI 486 SP3 has PCI, VLB and ISA.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

My old VLB disk controller setup had 2 IDE ports and i had WD Caviar 250mb disks on both and on my dx33 machine i ran windows 95. With 16mb ram,2mb CIRRUS LOGIC vlb GPU I had swapfile running on one disk whilst the O.S. ran on the other. Responsiveness was greatly improved...

That was a common trick.
I had SCSI wired to the yellow LED and IDE to the red LED, so activity on the red LED was one of the out of memory indicators on my system...

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-07-10, 05:55:

I remember my frustration trying sound recorder to dub compact disc tracks into the pc but the proper bitrate uncompressed said out of memory error if only mp3's were around for free in 1996 the pc wouldn't had been just a geek toy with a few shareware games like cat splat 🤣

Well, my cousin did it this way. He had an 8x Plextor Caddy SCSI CDROM in his Pentium 133.
Once I've purchased my UltraPlex SCSI I gave him a copy of the PlexTools disc. With its PlexManager he could create digital duplicates in 8x speed.

its getting hard to get that sort of stuff now because i haven't seen much for sale on ebay or anywhere else and most do not say tested working its ask the sellers and sadly most haven't answered some will actually remove their stuff too so i must suggest asking