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.

In my latest config update I managed to enable 32bit disk access via the vendor driver (wdc). Micro House always reported error „incorrect cylinder table“ or something. This was explained here several times.

Side note: quite sure the 32bit disk access is not worth enabling as start and shutdown will be delayed by the wdc driver initialization for quite a while. The windows shutdown btw as well

Explanation or pros/cons of Protected-Mode driver are described here:

Wikipedia on 32BDFA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_32-bit_disk_access

FastDisk: An Introduction to 32-Bit Disk Access (from Windows Ressource Kit)
https://www.tech-insider.org/windows/research … t/920221/7D.pdf

Another (newer?) version of Micro House driver:
https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2070

Thanks. I like the benchmark.

Also interesting statement in that wiki: „32-bit disk access offers less performance and is less likely to work on many computers than 32-bit file access„

You're welcome.

Yes, 32-Bit Disk Access can be slower, especially on modern hardware in which MS-DOS/BIOS code turn out to be faster than the old code in the Protected-Mode driver.

That's a bit like using ISA DMA vs Programmed I/O on an IBM PC vs 486 PC.
On an IBM PC, the DMA is the fastest mode while on a 486 PC it's now a bottleneck.

However, using DMA method or Protected-Mode driver can also turn out to be smoother despite being slower.
Raw throughput isn't everything, it depends.

What the 32-Bit Disk Access (FastDisk) does is providing a smooth interaction with the hard disk,
without going back and forth between Real-Mode and Protected-mode (so to say, there's V86 involved).

The side effect is, that multiple DOS boxes now run better. They can all have their virtual 640KB of memory now.
Without 32-Bit Disk Access, multitasking and DOS support is a bit worse, in short.

Edit: The 32-Bit File Access is the HDD cache. On a modern PC with lots of memory, it can be bigger.
It can be safely used both with and without 32-Bit Disk Access (FastDisk).
In some situations, SmartDrive can be turning out to be better, though.
It depends on the use case/application. CD-ROM drives can be cached by SmartDrive, for example.

If you have a Western Digital drive, I seem to recall their driver, 32pack, allows you to select the multisector level, I never really benched, but always set it to 8 sectors to match the 4k page

Thanks again both !