OT - 486 w/newer IDE drives

[Tothwolf]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On 11/24/06, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Chris M wrote:
>> > --- Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Of course, as others have pointed out, one can get an ISA or PCI IDE 
>> >> interface... that includes onboard BIOS
>> >
>> > In an ISA card?
>> 
>> 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.
>
> Perhaps that's what I'm remembering - VLB... I was reasonably certain 
> that there was an option for folks besides PCI.

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