your BX mobo may only support ATA33, your new VIA mobo should support ATA66.
Try ZDnet Disk Benchmark, it should give you fairly correct result.
On your VIA system, did you install the latest VIA 4in1 driver? win98
doesn't know new VIA chipset, you should install driver for it (much like
win95 doesn't know BX chipset).

Jun Qian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Le Dong Phuong" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2000 11:04 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Question on HDD performance


> I'm fighting with an issue which seems to be out of my ability right now.
>
> I've 2 Seagate HDD (ST310112A - 10.2GB each).  One is plugged in an 2
years
> old generic 440BX MB with an Celeron 266.  The other one is plugged in an
> new VIA chipset MB (I can't get the chipset description) with an Socket
370
> Celeron 466.  Both machines run 98SE. All the performance test on these
HDDs
> in DOS shown that they have the same performance (about 5MB/s read and
> write).  But testing in WIN provide different results.  The first one
> produced sustained write of about 5.5MB/s while the second one only
3.3MB/s.
> This caused me a lot of troubled since the second machine was designated
as
> video capturing and editing machine but the sustained writing was too low
> for video capturing, it dropped bunch of frames, making the .avi files
> unusable.
>
> Could anyone provide any insight or suggestion on this.
>
> Thanks
>
>                 Curious about the people moderating your
>                    messages? Visit our staff web site:
>                      http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html
>

               The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
      special "Free-After-Rebate" Software specials in conjunction
          with Beyond.com.   We have new offers all the time!!!
                      http://nospin.com/promotions