So I want to use a better HDD than my MVP3 supports plus ATA33 is just slow, I was thinking of grabbing either an ATA100/133 or SATA controller card for the system. Which do yall recomend, and which option works best for windows 98SE I want to get a 120gb hard drive in this
AFAIK no SATAII card has drivers for Win98, so you'll have to fallback on older SATAI controllers. That being said, some people in these forums had bad experiences with SATAI controllers and SATAIII HDDs.
The safest bet might be a good ATA100/133 controller with full Win98 support and use a decent SATA->IDE converter for newer HDDs.
well combatability isn't an issue there, I have a good working WD 120gb SATA 1 drive, I also have a working 160gb Seagate 7200.7 ATA 100 but my bios wont recognize it obviously 🤣, the controller doesn't support 48bit LBA
Just beware that not every SATA controller that has Win98 drivers supports DMA. I'm not sure how most IDE controllers fare in this subject.
If you want better performance, avoid controllers that do not support DMA under Win98. Yeah, they might be fast, but they''ll bring your CPU to its knees while transfering data, slowing down everything else.
PCI limits you to less than SATA 1 data rate anyway. Probably about 80MB/s.
I occasionally use a Promise SATA 150 TX2 with 98SE. It's solid. If the motherboard has UDMA66 or better, I use a SATA/PATA adapter board instead because it doesn't need any annoying drivers.
This also brings up the interesting factoid that chipsets like Intel 815 and VIA KT266 have an IDE controller separate from PCI. This allows full utilization of IDE separately from PCI. So if you want to use a SATA drive with one of these it's best to use a SATA/PATA adapter on the main IDE controller.
wrote:I've found ATA33 quite sufficient. Make sure DMA mode is working. I use modern hard-drives, like a 2 TB with 32 GB capacity limit, with SATA to IDE adapters. The main improvement is access time and I can tell that storage is not a limiting factor, but the processor.
what a waste, in that case i prefer some 32 or 64GB SSD...
wrote:wrote:I've found ATA33 quite sufficient. Make sure DMA mode is working. I use modern hard-drives, like a 2 TB with 32 GB capacity limit, with SATA to IDE adapters. The main improvement is access time and I can tell that storage is not a limiting factor, but the processor.
what a waste, in that case i prefer some 32 or 64GB SSD...
I use it for other projects too. The limit can be set to whatever you need. Sometimes I need it as a 2 TB, other times a 32 GB is enough. The drive didn't cost much, A$99 I believe. I tested Windows 98 SE performance vs. SSD and found it minimal.
This has worked well for me on many, many machines, so I'm sticking with it. Might not be for everyone, but it works very well for me.
hadn't thought about that, i can get a pretty cheap 60gb SATA drive with a SATA to IDE adaptor, ATA33 is slow, but with the way an SSD works it should be fine on my K6
ATA33 is a bit of a bottleneck. It's not a big deal by any stretch but I've repeatedly noticed a speed up by running a UDMA 66 card on my 440BX board instead of the UDMA 33. Of course it helps if you are running a Tualatin on a Slotket and not a PII 300 or something like that. Though since it is sort of a pain to deal with extra PCI cards, I usually don't bother.
wrote:ATA33 is a bit of a bottleneck. It's not a big deal by any stretch but I've repeatedly noticed a speed up by running a UDMA 66 card on my 440BX board instead of the UDMA 33. Of course it helps if you are running a Tualatin on a Slotket and not a PII 300 or something like that. Though since it is sort of a pain to deal with extra PCI cards, I usually don't bother.
The fastest CPU I have is a 1.1 GHz Coppermine through a slot 1 adapter. That setup is amazingly fast, a real joy to work and game on. I never had much luck in getting the DMA to work in PCI Sata controllers. Might be an incompatibility with the AOpen board though. The IDE ports always "just work" for me.
The other challenge is finding a good way to measure an improvement in performance, not so much a synthetic score, but something that actually makes a difference. For example when installing Windows 98 SE with an automated answer file, I observed little difference between a SATA HDD and a SSD.
Do the UniATA drivers work on Windows 9x? That would be a solution to the driver problem.
I've also had good luck with just size-limiting a more modern drive - I've not tried it with a SATA3 drive, but some older-ish SATA2 WDs that I've got worked just fine. Performance is better (and they tend to run quieter) than much older disks. I've also had good luck with just taking a newer-ish ATA133 drive and hooking it up on my Skt7 board - performance was more than acceptable imho, and better than contemporaneous drives (not as good as the newer WD, but certainly an improvement over an old 4-6GB).
wrote:never had much luck in getting the DMA to work in PCI Sata controllers. Might be an incompatibility with the AOpen board though. The IDE ports always "just work" for me.
Yeah PCI PATA/SATA cards can be touchy. Sometimes they cause problems with other PCI cards, particularly on Win9x, and it's a game of PCI card slot sorting. Promise SATA 150 TX2 is the only SATA card I've used and it does work fine with my Abit BF6. I've seen about 80MB/s from it. I'm not sure if I'd say it's rock solid though. I have doubts on that with Win9x...
Uh oh. Last year I built an image with a Syba SD-SATA150R included, and then stuck the system in storage. I never really tested the SATA card and assumed it would just work since the driver installed without any issues.
Does anybody have any experience with one of those Syba SD-SATA150R cards under Win9x? Am I going to need to pull that system out of storage and revisit it?
