OMORES wrote on 2022-10-22, 13:40:

32bit disk access in Windows 3.11 it's not a thing for me, but some youtube user was curios about this posibility... In real life, using a SSD via int 13h gives you about 10MB/s throughput... which is twice as much a regular hard drive could deliver in 1995. Not to mention the access time.

OMORES, I've found the article about the WfW 3.11 outperforming Windows NT.
It's in Byte Magazine, Issue February 1994, pages 181 to 183.

A snippet of the article with the benchmark numbers is attached. I hope that's okay.

By the way, you can find some FastDisk drivers over here:
http://ftp.mpoli.fi/pub/hardware/HDD/

Please also check out floppy disks that came with older HDD controllers or HDDs. Seagtae, Maxtor, Conner etc.
They sometime shipped with DOS, OS/2 and Windows utilities. Maybe you can find some ZIP archives of them online, too.

Among the utilities, there might be a FastDisk (32BDA) driver for Windows 3.x.

Especially SCSI or Caching/RAID controllers may have them by chance.
In comparison to the drivers shipped with the HDDs, they may not be manufactor-locked, also.

- That's something very annoying, by the way. Just like with "SIM Lock" on mobile phones or those free
backup programs shipped with HDDs, the drivers were sometimes dongled to a specific HDD series.

OMORES wrote on 2022-10-21, 19:48:

Well, I did try the newer version of MH32BIT.386 and I got an incompatibility error. Windows 3.11 won't load anymore unless 32bitacces=off.

I don't know how many drives does expect Micro House driver. With the older version I did get an error on 4 drives (as in the picture of my earlier post) but I have actually 7 physical drives connected. Maybe 3 of them got 32bit access? (didn't check)
[..]

Hi again, I forgot to ask - did you try the patch for the Ontrack FastDisk driver, too ?
It will update the driver for HDDs that follow ATA-2 specification; the one that made old WDCTRL in Windows 3.1x fail.

Jo22 wrote on 2021-03-19, 19:58:

There's also a patch for the Onteack driver:
https://github.com/Tony814/OntrackWMod

I can confirm that disks larger 8gb won’t work with the microhouse / ontrack overlay driver.
I’m using a 160gb hdd. Ontrack overlayed to 8gb on an 540mb bios. the provided disk driver for win 31 aren’t able to enable 32bit accesss. Maybe I try the ontrack patched driver set or the ezdisk ones

So what I did is installing the xt ide bios and rerun the tests. The microhouse driver will work. With some limitations:

- strangely only 32bit disk access for my large hdd. My 408mb hdd will be set to 16BIT
- the file access will be limited to 16BIT now for all drives. Before it was 32bit for all drives.

Especially when dealing with small to med size files the option without MH driver is to be preferred. I benched.