24 Nov
2006
24 Nov
'06
10:29 a.m.
On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On 11/24/06, Tothwolf <tothwolf at
concentric.net> wrote:
I have quite a few VLB ATA controllers around here still. Some of my
favorite designs were from Promise, but there wasn't much in the way of
software support for the onboard processor unless you only ran DOS (and
win 3.1). You were pretty much out of luck with them if you ran say BSD or
Minix. These predated modern hard drives with read-ahead, fast seek times,
and on-board cache memory, so they made a huge difference for the high end
workstation type PC compatible computers of that era.
There were EISA boards too, but they weren't very common because they were
much more expensive. VLB boards tended to be faster anyway, a EISA was
still limited to the same clock rate as ISA cards.
-Toth
On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Chris M wrote:
Perhaps that's what I'm remembering - VLB... I was reasonably certain
that there was an option for folks besides PCI. --- Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
wrote:
Promise made several models, as did Mylex (formerly BusLogic/BusTek).
If your motherboard has VLB slots, VLB controllers with address
translation for larger drives were fairly common. I've not personally
seen a ATA133 card, but I know 100s were available. Of course, as others have pointed out, one can
get an ISA or PCI IDE
interface... that includes onboard BIOS
In an ISA card?