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First post, by nzoomed

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Been doing speedsys tests and my read speed is not even 2MB\s and this is a seagate ST3660A medallist drive which should give me a transfer speed around 13 MB\s

I installed an AMI LBA ROM chip into a network card and with LBA enabled, its giving me much faster seek times, but only marginal improvement on read speeds.

Any ideas?
Here are my speedsys results with and without LBA enabled

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Reply 2 of 8, by nzoomed

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Oetker wrote on 2020-08-11, 08:18:

Aren't you just being bottlenecked by the ISA bus?

Im pretty sure the ISA bus is at least 8MB/s or more
If you look at all the other Speedsys results people are posting, they are getting much faster speeds than mine with their 386.
Im seeing some with 4-5MB/s, including linear speeds, mine is only around 3-400 KB\s

Reply 4 of 8, by firage

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It's a PIO 3 drive, but it's not actually meant to perform anywhere close to 13 MB/sec. https://www.redhill.net.au/d/35.php

Linear read at 388...438 KB/sec is very poor, however. Bottlenecked by the system.

My big-red-switch 486

Reply 5 of 8, by waterbeesje

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Try the drive on any faster machine and compare the results: is it the drive or the main system? I'd guess the latter.

You could try to see what happens if you get the ISA bus to 9 or 10MHz. If the bus is the bottleneck, things should speed up.
Little warning: if anything can't keep up you might get data corruption and need to reinstall. Usually 10MHz ISA will do just fine for I/o and VGA.

ISA is known to be slower than the CPU bus, your I/o card may be bottlenecking even more.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 6 of 8, by nzoomed

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mrau wrote on 2020-08-11, 08:43:

the randomness of the graph and the vesa data scramble suggest some incompatibility; this thing garbles your firmware?

Yes I noticed that too. That result is with the AMI LBA ROM too.

Either way, the overall speed is better with it but only marginally.

Reply 7 of 8, by nzoomed

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firage wrote on 2020-08-11, 08:48:

It's a PIO 3 drive, but it's not actually meant to perform anywhere close to 13 MB/sec. https://www.redhill.net.au/d/35.php

Linear read at 388...438 KB/sec is very poor, however. Bottlenecked by the system.

I don't think the ISA bottleneck should make it that slow though?
Most linear reads im seeing from others are at least 1-2 MB/s

Reply 8 of 8, by nzoomed

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waterbeesje wrote on 2020-08-11, 09:08:
Try the drive on any faster machine and compare the results: is it the drive or the main system? I'd guess the latter. […]
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Try the drive on any faster machine and compare the results: is it the drive or the main system? I'd guess the latter.

You could try to see what happens if you get the ISA bus to 9 or 10MHz. If the bus is the bottleneck, things should speed up.
Little warning: if anything can't keep up you might get data corruption and need to reinstall. Usually 10MHz ISA will do just fine for I/o and VGA.

ISA is known to be slower than the CPU bus, your I/o card may be bottlenecking even more.

My BIOS does not allow me to change ISA clock speeds, but I'm hoping I can play around with this after a BIOS upgrade.

I've had similar results with other goldstar cards I've got on hand, but will try other io cards and hard drives to see if that makes any difference.

The goldstar prime 2c is supposed to be a good card i thought.