buy another cf card? 😀 its not like 486 will do a ton of writes in casual retro use
You could also buy $5 with free shipping JMicron JM20330 ide-sata bridge and play with old sata SSDs.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-09-02, 23:12:

buy another cf card? 😀 its not like 486 will do a ton of writes in casual retro use
You could also buy $5 with free shipping JMicron JM20330 ide-sata bridge and play with old sata SSDs.

Or SATA HDDs as they support multi-sector operations and SSDs don't.

OP, are you using the UMC UM8886AF drivers for DOS and Windows? The read performance varies a lot depending on with or without the driver.

leon22 wrote on 2023-09-02, 22:55:

Should I go for a SCSI drive or what are the best options? System: […]
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Should I go for a SCSI drive or what are the best options?
System:

• Gigabyte GA-486AM with latest BIOS (Nov 7 1995)
• AMD Am5x86-133 MHz
• 64 MB RAM
• Hercules Terminator 3D S3 ViRGE (4MB)
• OS: MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups

1) When you have 256 kB of L2 cache and you operate it in write back, it is very likely that half of your RAM is outside of the cacheable area
2) With 16 bit operating system you don't need to go for SCSI
3) You may try a PCI SATA controller like DawiControl DC-150 and add a small SSD -- but you won't use more than 8 GB out of it with DOS/WfW.
4) It is sad that this board does not have PS/2 mouse support

Thx, I use now a 40GB IDE harddrive (had this lying around).

Good choice, nothing better than the sound of spinning rust in old PC's like this!

The fastest solution is a RAM drive/RAM disk, since it by-passes all bottlenecks.
That's what my dad used to tell me. He used that surplus memory in his XTs/ATs as a RAM drive on DOS.
This way, he didn't need to play disc-jockey with the floppy drives or wait for the squeaky MFM/RLL drive.
(HDD caches like Smart Drive weren't as popular of efficient yet. Old PC-Tools had one, I admit.)

The idea isn't exactly new, though.
Both Macintosh and Amiga users were already familiar with RAM drives in the 80s.

That being said, there also were physical solutions.
In the beginning, before PC Cards/PCMCIA memory cards or CF cards were used in embedded, there were RAM-based floppy drives.
They did act like real floppy drives, but were based on DIP/DIL RAM chips. They looked a bit like an EMS board (say Intel Aboveboard), just half the size.
The reason for this was that the RAM was expensive at the time and that the RAM drive's storage capacity was little (roughly 2MB or less; let's say 512 KB).
Such capacities could be mounted on the system as regular floppy drives, still. No need for a fixed-disk emulation yet, which would have been more complex.

On a 486 system, a caching IDE/SCSI controller could still be useful, maybe.
It does use RAM for caching/buffering and has an intelligent controller. The throughput may be the same as a CF card, but..
The caching controller might be tougher. If lot's of read/write requests occur, a CF card tends to start to stutter (seen that on Win98 rigs).
That's because it has little to no cache, was designed for linear (continuous) read/write operations. Most modern CF cards I've seen no longer seem to have that tiny 1KB cache.

Edit: You can also do caching in software, if enough RAM is available.
Solutions like Helix Multimedia Cloaking have a Smart Drive replacement that runs above 1MB, so it won't steel conventional memory.
But there are other solutions, as well, of course. Running a type of cache is needed for CD-ROM games, anyway.
Without caching, or a modern CD-ROM drive that has a big buffer, the game play will not be very smooth.

The problem with modern CD-ROM drives is, however, that they spin at a high rate. Whenever a track is being switched, the drive slows-down or stops and this gives you stutter.
This makes the gameplay worse than back in the day of single-speed and double-speed drives.
To fix that, the CD-ROM drive must be re-programmed to run at a slower, constant speed, so it won't be speeding-up/down everytime.
There are DOS programs like CDSPEED that may help, *IF* the CD-ROM drive in question supports manual override.

Edit: Utility attached. Good luck! 😀 🤞

Thank you very much @Jo22! This was very helpful.