🚀 go-pugleaf

Replies to this would be very much appreciated as I seem to
be getting nothing but conflicting advice from dealers.

I have a DX66 VESA motherboard (8mb ram) with an AMI bios
of 08/08/93 (10/01/93)  - yes, it gives two different dates
on boot up - and a couple of enhanced Western Digital hard
disks the 425mb and 850mb. I am using Ontract Drive Manager
to overcome the 540mb plus limitation.

Using my standard IDE/IO ISA card I am getting a transfer
rate of 900mb a second, pretty terrible I know, especially
when I get well over 1.1mb/sec when using the card with a
plain ISA motherboard, with a DX33 installed.

I know I need an Enhanced card to get the speed up and
but nobody can give me clear advice on which type.

So far I have been told that I can get either an enhanced
card with enhanced bios on the card, which means I do not
have to use Ontrack Drive manager, but that this is
expensive and it would be better to get a new motherboard
with this built in. I would rather postpone this decision
for about 12 months and then probably upgrade to a Pentium/PCI

Or

I can use the Ontrack software to take care of the drive
size over 540mb and get a standard enhanced IO card. What
no dealer can give me a straight answer on is

Will this cause a significant performance drop off?

Will this compromise work?

Since these cards range in price from 15-30 ($25-50) are
they all pretty much the same. Are there any good makes,
are there any to avoid?


Any advice offered on this would be really appreciated, I
spent over an hour on the phone today getting too much
conflicting advice to now make a sound decision on what I
know. Could replies be e-mailed as my service provider is
currently having great problems with news.



Brian Sheehan
brian@rosebery.demon.co.uk