Caching IDE controllers

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently I have come to own a caching IDE controller made by Perceptive Solutions, called the "WinStore". It's pretty interesting because it has some sort of compression coprocessor daughterboard attached to it. Does anybody have any idea of what kind of performance I might be able to expect out of this thing? I was thinking about using it in one of my 486 class systems, but many people seem to suggest that caching controllers are useless on motherboards that have sufficient amounts of memory. So, I was considering using this controller on a 286 system instead, where the onboard memory is quite a bit slower. Do you guys think that I would recieve any real performance benefits running one of these controllers in an 8mb 286 system? Another "great" feature of this card is that it only seems to support up to 512mb drives!!!! I wonder if overlays work with it.

[Unknown_K]

http://www.psidisk.com/legacy.html#ws

WinStore

The WinStore is a reduced feature, specialized ASIC version of the 400I EasyCache Pro (see below). The board was sold for a limited time, between the introduction of IDE drives and before these drives became larger than 512MB which required a change in motherboard BIOS support.

These boards are identifiable by a silk-screen legend, IDE, Rev-B1 between the memory and ROM sockets. Up to 8MB of user installable memory was supported. The boards include 256KB of onboard memory. Additional memory is required for drives above 200MB total capacity.

The board provides disk caching support for up to 2 drives of up to 512 MB each. Drive parameters are set in the motherboard BIOS. The controller occupies I/O address space identical to that of a standard IDE controller. Motherboards with onboard controllers will have conflicting addresses.

Upgrades and support are no longer available. If specific information is required, contact PSI.