VOGONS


Abit SH6 transfer to SH6-R

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First post, by Atom Ant

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My brand new Abit SH6 motherboard has arrived, and I quickly realized that it is very similar to my SA6-R. Perhaps the BIOSes are even interchangeable between the two motherboards. If the BIOS detects the RAID chip, it should work with it.

My plan is to move the RAID chip and the two IDE connectors from the SA6-R to the SH6. My only concern is that the SH6 is an extremely rare and valuable motherboard. Will I ruin its value if I modify it, even though this could make it an even rarer item—something Abit may have planned to do but never accomplished?

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My high end of '96 gaming machine;
Intel PR440FX - Pentium Pro 200MHz 512K, Matrox Millenium I 4MB, Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo II 12MB SLI, 128MB EDO RAM, Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold, 4x Creative CD reader, Windows 95...

Reply 1 of 27, by dominusprog

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So what is the issue with the SA6-R board anyway?

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A-Trend ATC-1020 V1.1 ❇ Cyrix 6x86 150+ @ 120MHz ❇ 32MiB EDO RAM (8MiBx4) ❇ A-Trend S3 Trio64V2 2MiB
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Reply 2 of 27, by H3nrik V!

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Did you buy it from the bay like this week? I spotted one, but Christmas presents had already taken its toll on my budget, so had to let it go 😉

Being to me at least, almost a holy grail, I wouldn't mess around with transplanting the RAID controller and connectors, all though it would be incredibly cool if you got it to work 😎 but again, the probability that the BIOS is interchangeable is probably also pretty slim ..

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

--- GA586DX --- P2B-DS --- BP6 ---

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 3 of 27, by The Serpent Rider

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While you certainly can do it, adding a PCI card with the same controller will have the same effect. They are connected via PCI bus anyway.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 4 of 27, by H3nrik V!

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The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-12-17, 19:12:

While you certainly can do it, adding a PCI card with the same controller will have the same effect. They are connected via PCI bus anyway.

It will occupy a PCI slot, though. However, I have no idea if that's a practical or theoretical issue, I'm terms of maybe running out of IRQs?

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

--- GA586DX --- P2B-DS --- BP6 ---

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 5 of 27, by The Serpent Rider

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It has 6 slots though and onboard controller is already occupying some IRQ, since it's attached to PCI bus.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 6 of 27, by soggi

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First...at the very first, I have to say that I don't support destroying such a board. You should be able to get the parts from another place. And it's not just about the IDE RAID controller and the IDE ports...I guess there are also a lot of resistors and stuff which have to be (de)soldered.

Now let's come to the hard facts:

Atom Ant wrote on 2024-12-17, 12:03:

My brand new Abit SH6 motherboard has arrived, and I quickly realized that it is very similar to my SA6-R. Perhaps the BIOSes are even interchangeable between the two motherboards. If the BIOS detects the RAID chip, it should work with it.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-12-17, 18:46:

but again, the probability that the BIOS is interchangeable is probably also pretty slim ..

It depends on the revision of the board...there are the following boards:

ABIT SH6 - slot 1 - latest BIOS 7U
ABIT SA6 (v1.0/v1.1) - socket 370 - latest BIOS 7X
ABIT SA6R (v1.0) - socket 370 - latest BIOS 7U
ABIT SA6R (v1.1/v1.2) - socket 370 - latest BIOS 7X

The latest BIOS images can be found on my website's ABIT page -> https://soggi.org/motherboards/abit.htm. Your SA6R is a v1.0 (see sticker near the IDE connectors), so it uses the same BIOS (7U) like the SH6.

So if you have the ABIT SA6R v1.0, it shares the BIOS with the ABIT SH6 - it's the exact same board, just with another CPU interface and unpopulated places on the SH6. If you have a ABIT SA6R v1.1/1.2 it has a different BIOS and therefor something on the board is different to the ABIT SH6.

BTW is it possible for you to provide better (hi-res) photographs, so that I can read the markings of the AC'97 codecs, clock gens, and PWM controllers?

kind regards
soggi

Last edited by soggi on 2024-12-18, 01:19. Edited 1 time in total.

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 7 of 27, by auron

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dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-17, 16:58:

So what is the issue with the SA6-R board anyway?

bloated capacitors, judging by the picture, as seems to be customary for abit gear.

Reply 8 of 27, by dionb

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auron wrote on 2024-12-17, 23:02:

[...]
bloated capacitors, judging by the picture, as seems to be customary for abit gear.

Time to break out the soldering iron then. Not a difficult fix. A lot easier than moving RAID chip and IDE connectors.

Reply 9 of 27, by rasz_pl

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Yes, replacing caps is much easier (after pre-heating board around them) than moving high pitch chips around.

Btw calling this a "raid" controller is a stretch, this was the era of soft-raids where all the magic happened on CPU running controller bios soft raid.

https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module for AT&T Globalyst
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 memory board
https://github.com/raszpl/440BX Reference Design adapted to Kicad
https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS MFM-300 Monitor

Reply 10 of 27, by soggi

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rasz_pl:

I thought what we call Soft-RAID is what occurred a bit later - the integrated functionalities of several southbridges like VIA VT8237R f.e.!? The ABIT SA6R has a separate HighPoint HPT370 controller which has it's own BIOS (integrated into the motherboard's BIOS as a module). You could also buy a PCI controller card with a HPT370 and a separate ROM on it.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 11 of 27, by rasz_pl

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Its the same thing, both are soft-raid. If you look at HPT370 datasheet its just an ordinary 2 channel IDE controller.

https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module for AT&T Globalyst
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 memory board
https://github.com/raszpl/440BX Reference Design adapted to Kicad
https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS MFM-300 Monitor

Reply 12 of 27, by soggi

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OK, did some research...I knew those controllers are "cheap" ones for consumer desktop boards, but didn't know it's that disastrous. So it's even quite better to have a real IDE RAID controller - a PCI card f.e. with i960 and its own RAM. And much better would be a SCSI controller on PCI-X, but this has other pitfalls sneaking around the corner...

So yes, I wouldn't destroy the one board (SA6R) to build a never officially existing one (SH6R), it's not worth it.

kind regards
soggi

Last edited by soggi on 2024-12-18, 06:32. Edited 1 time in total.

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 13 of 27, by darry

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I don't have great memories of HPT366 and HPT370 soft RAID controllers.

PCI bus bandwidth is a limiting factor anyway and any half decent newish single HDD, let alone an SSD, can saturate the legacy PCI bus. This makes RAID-0 utterly pointless. RAID-1 might be of interest if one needs DATA integrity, but I can't really imagine the point of it on a retro setup (not to mention that having to do this in software will generate double the I/O of a single drive, which will slow things down on fast enough drives) , but that's just me.

I'm not against modding or hacking to gain extra functionality, but an HPT370 on a 33MHz PCI bus appeals to me about as much as root canal surgery without anesthesia. IMHO, it was crap back in the day and I doubt it has gotten any better over the years.

Reply 14 of 27, by darry

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soggi wrote on 2024-12-18, 06:29:
OK, did some research...I knew those controllers are "cheap" ones for consumer desktop boards, but didn't know it's that disastr […]
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OK, did some research...I knew those controllers are "cheap" ones for consumer desktop boards, but didn't know it's that disastrous. So it's even quite better to have a real IDE RAID controller - a PCI card f.e. with i960 and its own RAM. And much better would be a SCSI controller on PCI-X, but this has other pitfalls sneaking around the corner...

So yes, I wouldn't destroy the one board (SA6R) to build a never officially existing one (SH6R), it's not worth it.

kind regards
soggi

100% in agreement

Reply 15 of 27, by soggi

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darry wrote on 2024-12-18, 06:32:

I don't have great memories of HPT366 and HPT370 soft RAID controllers.

I recall fiddling around with HPT366 on my ABIT BE6 and ABIT BP6 - if you had the latest controller BIOS integrated, the speed was limited to 10 MB/s. It was mostly recommended to deactivate the HPT366. 🤣

darry wrote on 2024-12-18, 06:32:

PCI bus bandwidth is a limiting factor anyway and any half decent newish single HDD, let alone an SSD, can saturate the legacy PCI bus. This makes RAID-0 utterly pointless...

...but an HPT370 on a 33MHz PCI bus appeals to me about as much as root canal surgery without anesthesia. IMHO, it was crap back in the day and I doubt it has gotten any better over the years.

Did you confuse something? PCI has 133 MB/s in theory and HPT370 has 100 MB/s - so it's no problem to have it connected to PCI, no matter which storage device you connect to it. That the HPTs aren't the best is the other story, I don't know much about the higher ones, just HPT366 as described above.

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - inactive at the moment

Reply 16 of 27, by H3nrik V!

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Being soft RAID or not, RAID-0 and RAID-1 isn't very computing intensive, it's "write one block here, the next block there" or "write this same block on both disks" 'ish ... It's not doing parity calculations etc.?

If it's dual it's kind of cool ... 😎

--- GA586DX --- P2B-DS --- BP6 ---

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 17 of 27, by The Serpent Rider

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Both boards have ICH2 south bridge, with native ATA100 ports working on a separate I/O bus, instead of clogging PCI bus.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 18 of 27, by dionb

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soggi wrote on 2024-12-18, 06:29:

OK, did some research...I knew those controllers are "cheap" ones for consumer desktop boards, but didn't know it's that disastrous. So it's even quite better to have a real IDE RAID controller - a PCI card f.e. with i960 and its own RAM. And much better would be a SCSI controller on PCI-X, but this has other pitfalls sneaking around the corner...

It's actually not that disastrous, depending on your use case.

The use case for these chips was to get some extra I/O speed with striping RAID 0. Mirroring using RAID 1 was also supported, as was mirroring+striping. None of this is CPU-intensive, unlike the parity calculations needed for RAID 3, 5 or 6. So the performance hit on the CPU isn't huge, and it's even smaller if you consider that that CPU is usually waiting for I/O at precisely the times that it would be called on to facilitate that I/IO. Conversely the system CPU runs much faster than an i960 or similar on a card, so I/O performance can be higher, and with less latency - so long as the CPU impact isn't bottlenecking, it's actually faster.

Of course that all applies to full software RAID too - but that requires an OS that supports it, which Win9x didn't, and you couldn't boot from the RAID partition. Using these 'fake' RAID chips pushed management of the array into firmware, allowing any OS to use it and allowing you to boot from it, avoiding the need for complex partitioning (which was beyond the abilities of the average desktop user and for that matter the installers of contemporary operating systems).

For server tasks none of this applies. There you want more complex RAID modes and overall load would be more I/O intensive (and less latency-sensitive) so APUs on dedicated hardware RAID cards were a far better idea. And if you still wanted/needed software RAID, server OSs supported that long before desktop OSs did.

TLDR: in their day and for their intended purpose, these solutions made sense.

Reply 19 of 27, by Atom Ant

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H3nrik V!: Yes, it’s from eBay. Glad you didn’t have the money for it. 😉

The Serpent Rider: I don’t really want extra card; needs good airflow under the Voodoo 4 4800 AGP.

soggi: I wouldn’t destroy that SA6-R board, just would become to a regular SA6. Anyway, the SA6-R looks kind of old compared to this new SH6. The capacitors are bulging.

Okay, so actually, I’m unsure about doing the modification. It feels more like I shouldn’t do it. While a third ATA connector would be useful, I’ll manage to connect everything using the two existing ATA connectors.

My high end of '96 gaming machine;
Intel PR440FX - Pentium Pro 200MHz 512K, Matrox Millenium I 4MB, Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo II 12MB SLI, 128MB EDO RAM, Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold, 4x Creative CD reader, Windows 95...