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Author Topic: Review of my Acard ARS-2000SUP SCSI to 2.5" SATA adapter  (Read 8784 times)

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Offline mousehouseTopic starter

Review of my Acard ARS-2000SUP SCSI to 2.5" SATA adapter
« on: September 12, 2011, 06:57:44 AM »
For quite some time I have been looking for a good SCSI drive solution for my Amiga(s) that is both reliable and relatively speedy. I have a A3000D and A4000D which I both use infrequently - mainly because of a shortage of available time - and both my A3000 and A4000 are equipped with SCSI controllers. I have used the A4000D on Compact Flash using a CF2IDE adapter for a short while, but the performance of the IDE interface on the 4000 did not make me very happy. Besides, I have a good SCSI controller available in the machine! Also, I like to move my drive around occasionally between machines which I cannot do with the CF. The SCSI drives I could find were either 10K rpm SCA2 drives from server systems or really old SE UltraSCSI drives which I do not trust my data with.

As a solution I purchased two refurbished Seagate drives from a Dutch company that were new in all practical ways. The joy! They work great, do exactly as promised, work flawlessly and were an instant reminder why SCSI sucked so bad. The drive is noisy - although not as noisy as it's full-height older SCSI cousins - it just is very audible. While this gives me a truly retro feeling and really takes me back to 1990 (when I bought my first 100MB Quantum SCSI drive with controller) technology has moved beyond this. I still love my Amiga but cannot stand the noise of the drive anymore for extended periods of time (more than a few hours). Second issue with the drive is the speed, it is no speed devil in any way. Usually this is not a problem, but I could not get a HAM8 video demo to run (courtesy of Tahoe) from HD, it just could not get it from the drive quickly enough.

In the meantime I scouted the local 2nd hand sites from drives and tried many different types and kinds. This involves messing with many different SCSI convertors (SCA2 to WideSCSI to 50PIN USCSI, etc. etc.). This often creates more problems than it solves and if termination is an issue anywhere will cause many hours of digging, searching and trying. This gave me faster drives but often even more noise than my 2b Seagate. Winner of the noise contest was a 10K SCA Fujitsu drive!

After doing some research on the net I decided to order a ACARD ARS-2000SUP, a SATA to UltraSCSI bridge masqueraded as a 3.5 inch drive. Although expensive it does allow me to use a 2.5 inch laptop drive as UltraSCSI drive without any hassles. As it has a 3.5 inch drive form factor it gives the A4000D the needed stability as the drive connects the PSU to the backplane.

The ACARD ARS-2000SUP is the newer version of the ACARD SCSI to SATA bridge they apparently have been selling for many years.



My setup
A4000D, revision B;
2Mb ChipRam / 12Mb FastRam on the motherboard;
GVP A4060DT 68060 @ 50MHz accelerator with 128MB memory on-board and FastSCSI2;
PicassoIV (slot 1);
Ariadne Ethernet (slot 2);
Deneb USB card (slot 3);
Onboard IDE terminated using the small board from Amigakit;

First the box…
The package is quite small and comparable to any harddisk upgrade for your average PC. Inside there is the drive, nicely packaged in an antistatic bag, 8 drive screws for the drive and the enclosure and a brief manual.

The manual
The manual is actually very nice as it gives pictures of the (very easy) installation steps. Nothing special there.



The case
This is much nicer than I had anticipated. It is made of strong aluminium, no sharp edges. Looks very nice and clean. The top comes off easily where you can see the embedded controller that does all the hard work. There is plenty of room for the 2.5" SATA disk. I do not think the very high 1TB drives will fit, but my small laptop drive left a few mm's of height unused. The jumper layout for the SCSI side is printed on the case and I was surprised to see that the case itself includes a terminator which can be set ON or OFF.



Installation
Easy. Just remove the four screws on the top of the case and the top and side (one metal part) come off. Slide in the SATA drive, use 4 screws to fixate it to the case and reinstall the top. Now it's the same size as a standard 3.5" harddisk.

I installed it into my A4000D in the SCSI chain that exists of the SCSI controller and the trusted Seagate HD. After booting I fired up HDToolBox (using the OS3.9 version), selected the correct SCSI controller and the drive was detected. I added a 2GB partition (as to avoid any partition / drive barrier issues) and wrote the RDB to disk. After a quick reboot I formatted the drive with FFS and it was ready for it's first real test! BTW I'm using 0x0000FE00 as MaxTransfer, I still need to figure out proper settings for this.



Speed
I haven't made a very thorough benchmark. I wanted to have some numbers so that I could compare the old setup to the new. I used SysSpeed in the latest version from Aminet to determine the differences. Look at the two screenshots and see for yourself! The raw read speed went from ~3.65MB/s to ~5.5MB/s, that is about 50% extra speed. Still not stellar performance, but remember I still need to tune my MaxTransfer etc.

Price
This is not a cheap alternative for a "real" SCSI disk, neither is it on the same level as a CF to IDE adapter which is nearly free on Ebay. The unit cost me about US$160. It is however a large drive that I can move between my Amiga's when needed and fits in nicely.

All in all I am very happy with this little box. As a next step I will add two PFS3 partitions to it to be able to use the rest of the ~130GB diskspace on the drive. Also I will need to dive into the Mask/Transfer stuff to see if I can squeeze more out of the drive. And when I get my A3000D from the attic I will test it using the SCSI controller in that machine as well.
« Last Edit: September 12, 2011, 07:11:58 AM by mousehouse »
A3000T
 

Offline mousehouseTopic starter

Re: Review of my Acard ARS-2000SUP SCSI to 2.5" SATA adapter
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2011, 02:44:36 PM »
The Acard is not a cheap solution but the fact that "it just works", provides a nice speedup and is nearly inaudible are worth the money to me! Also it allows me to use new drives for now and the next X years, instead of relying on older and older SCSI drives.

Of topic, I remember some other Dutch Amiga fans getting ~30MB/s on the CSPPC UW SCSI interface. Definitely out of reach with the (theoretical max) 10MB/s interface on my cards...
A3000T
 

Offline mousehouseTopic starter

Re: Review of my Acard ARS-2000SUP SCSI to 2.5" SATA adapter
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2011, 03:07:50 PM »
Nice!! That's how it's done ;-)
A3000T
 

Offline mousehouseTopic starter

Re: Review of my Acard ARS-2000SUP SCSI to 2.5" SATA adapter
« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2011, 06:33:03 PM »
Quote from: ddniUK;659216
ARE YOU ON DRUGS? Post 24 IS using Sysinfo .....


Completely right of course, but let's drop it ;-)

The Acard is super nice and humming along great in my A4000D. I actually managed to squeeze 6MB/s out of it now by increasing the buffers, now if I could get my PFS3 partition recognized...
A3000T