| I picked up an older DTC VLB IDE/EIDE board and tried it out - then
took it back. I noticed that installed stock, it provided esentially
zero performance improvement. With the drivers installed, performance
increaset 2-4 times, which is significant. The problem is that this
board's drivers will not co-exist with ONDISK/ONTRACK and the first IDE
port will not support LBA. I could not get the second port, which is
supposed to support LBA working properly - it wouldn't even see a
vanila 500MB disk with 2 partitions on it. Wrote to DTC and they
suggested that I re-low level format the disk, that there was some
hidden driver put on by the manufacturer. I was concerned that if that
is true and I zeroed it out, I may never use that disk again....
Since that was a rather old controller, it also had a 16450 instead of
a 16550 for the serial ports, another concern.
None the less, the performance benchmark improvement, as measured by
the DTC tool, was very impressive.
I believe the best way to go is with the Promise 2300+ with a street
price of about $50. Computer show this weekend may bring other
options.
Bob
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