I had experience with the 486DX4-100 with VLB and I ran a transfer test software that test the performance of the hard drive and I was able to get approx 1.3MB/s and my friend had a 486DX2-66 with onboard IDE and it was able to transfer 4.5MB/s. The onboard IDE was a PCI circuit. But you getting faster performance with older ISA card than VLB card, sounds to me you do not have the driver installed to take advantage of the VLB chip. CH > Hi folks, > > I'm wondering about something: I have a 486DX2/66 box with Vesa Local Bus > (VLB). That machine also has a VLB IDE card (Promise 20x0 (2020, I > think)). What strikes me odd, though, is that the hard drive access on > this box is very slow: The 340MB Quantum drive I have in there only > gives me <=1.4MB/s according to hdparm. The very same drive in a P133 > box (with onboard IDE) runs at 3.4MB/s, i.e. more than twice the speed I > get out of the VLB card. Funny enough, if I put an old ISA IDE card into > the 485, I get up to 1.6MB/s, i.e. faster(!) than the VLB card. > > I've been browsing around the kernel documentation and found something > about a compile time option for 32bit access on VLB, but I didn't find > any way to enable suchh a thing. I also experimented with hdparm's > option to enable 32bit access, but that didn't change anything. > I also checked the usual suspects (IRQs/DMAs), but I can't see any > clashes. > > Hence my question: > > Am I actually right in expecting that a VLB IDE controller should give > me more speed than an ISA one or am I overlooking something here? > I just want to make sure that the system is running at optimum and not > accidentally having problems - I have no experience with VLB so far... > :-} > > Thanks in advance, > > Thomas > -- > "Look, Ma, no obsolete quotes and plain text only!" > -- To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject.
