jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
My current "best" machine is a PII-450 running on an AX6B M/B(440BX chipset). DMA33 transfers work fine in Windows, but not in DOS. Yes, they are set in the CMOS but apparently that doesn't make them active unless the appropriate driver is loaded.
Why do I even care if I have Ultra33 transfers in DOS? The reason is because when Windows crashes and restarts(which can be quite often when I'm playing with the buggy Route Editor in MS TrainSim, or using good old IE), the stupid Scandisk routine takes about 20 times as long to complete as it would under Windows. I know I can stop it, but I always let it run just in case something is amiss from the last crash. My older machine, a 200 MHz Pentium, doesn't exhibit this problem. In that machine I have a Promise Ultra33 card which has DMA transfers enabled all the time by default, and the DOS scandisk is only slightly slower than the Windows version(slower because the 32-bit drivers aren't loaded in a pure DOS environment). Benchmarking under pure DOS gives me buffer-to-host transfer rates of ~30 MB/sec in the older machine and ~10 MB/sec in the PII, but the PII feels much slower than those numbers would indicate. I'm just tired of having the machine sidelined for up to an hour each time it crashes doing a scandisk. I have two hard disks, 4 partitions total, and something like 160,000 files, so just checking the file system on all the partitions(which happens if I changed even one thing on each of them), not even doing a surface scan, can take that long. It takes ~6 minutes to do it under Windows. Thankfully scandisk doesn't do a surface scan after Windows crashes, or the machine would be sidelined all day! My 100GB Maxtor takes a few hours for that even under Windows.
I have searched high and low to no avail for DOS DMA drivers, and I can't believe this isn't something that people never asked for given Windows propensity for crashing and then restarting with the famous scandisk program.
Why do I even care if I have Ultra33 transfers in DOS? The reason is because when Windows crashes and restarts(which can be quite often when I'm playing with the buggy Route Editor in MS TrainSim, or using good old IE), the stupid Scandisk routine takes about 20 times as long to complete as it would under Windows. I know I can stop it, but I always let it run just in case something is amiss from the last crash. My older machine, a 200 MHz Pentium, doesn't exhibit this problem. In that machine I have a Promise Ultra33 card which has DMA transfers enabled all the time by default, and the DOS scandisk is only slightly slower than the Windows version(slower because the 32-bit drivers aren't loaded in a pure DOS environment). Benchmarking under pure DOS gives me buffer-to-host transfer rates of ~30 MB/sec in the older machine and ~10 MB/sec in the PII, but the PII feels much slower than those numbers would indicate. I'm just tired of having the machine sidelined for up to an hour each time it crashes doing a scandisk. I have two hard disks, 4 partitions total, and something like 160,000 files, so just checking the file system on all the partitions(which happens if I changed even one thing on each of them), not even doing a surface scan, can take that long. It takes ~6 minutes to do it under Windows. Thankfully scandisk doesn't do a surface scan after Windows crashes, or the machine would be sidelined all day! My 100GB Maxtor takes a few hours for that even under Windows.
I have searched high and low to no avail for DOS DMA drivers, and I can't believe this isn't something that people never asked for given Windows propensity for crashing and then restarting with the famous scandisk program.