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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: mousehouse on September 12, 2011, 06:57:44 AM
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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.
(http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard01_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard01.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard02_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard02.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard03_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard03.jpg)
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.
(http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard04_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard04.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard05_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard05.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard06_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard06.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard07_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard07.jpg)
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.
(http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard08_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard08.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard09_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard09.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard10_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard10.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard11_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard11.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard12_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard12.jpg)
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.
(http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard13_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard13.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard14_small.jpg) (http://www.sneeuwberg.com/posted_attachments/acard14.jpg)
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.
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Thank you so much for this extended review mate!
Indeed ACards are such full of win and I seen one more time a test of a SATA inteface on an Amiga! Cheers for that.
I used an 7220U with an 2.5HD also on my A4000 mounted on a custom bracket (http://mfilos.blogspot.com/2011/08/a4000-custom-525-bracket.html) and except being so silent... it gave me a constant 18.3MB/s (measured in SysSpeed) although I need to alter my Max Transfer mask as well :)
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EvyXtOnEiFg/TkVaUzW3MqI/AAAAAAAAAjo/uhRxe3tLEEY/s320/DSC03541.JPG) (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EvyXtOnEiFg/TkVaUzW3MqI/AAAAAAAAAjo/uhRxe3tLEEY/s1600/DSC03541.JPG) (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KvRd4U1f1EI/TkVfh4AVn5I/AAAAAAAAAlA/jGgnt-wX6Ws/s320/DSC03565.JPG) (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KvRd4U1f1EI/TkVfh4AVn5I/AAAAAAAAAlA/jGgnt-wX6Ws/s1600/DSC03565.JPG)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AOVL_A3YVV0/TkumOUvlBTI/AAAAAAAAAng/79MpmOjvDTk/s320/IMG-20110817-00144.jpg)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AOVL_A3YVV0/TkumOUvlBTI/AAAAAAAAAng/79MpmOjvDTk/s1600/IMG-20110817-00144.jpg)
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Very nice, I've been thinking about getting one of these for years, but it's been prioritized down and down all the time :)
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that is a expensive solution and adds unnecesary hardware to the Amiga
for the 3000 is ok cause there is no ide
btw,please post a sysinfo screenshot with the drive speed tests because sysspeed'tests are not dependable
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There is no such thing as expensive if you want nice solutions for your loving machines.
The fact that IDE exists for example on A4000 doesn't compare with the awesome speedup and less CPU usage by using SCSI interface.
As mousehouse said, SCSI is awesome but it's noisy and also power hungry. For putting cheap and 2.5" HDs ACards are an awesome solution that work just fine.
Btw SysInfo gives a bit less results but I always known that SysSpeed was more trustworthy than SysInfo when it comes to drive reading numbers.
For example in my setup...SysInfo gives about 15.7MB/s while SysSpeed gives about 18.3MB/s. Still a great deal of difference comparing to the internal IDE @ 2.5MB/s don't you think? :)
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I used an 7220U with an 2.5HD also on my A4000 mounted on a custom bracket (http://mfilos.blogspot.com/2011/08/a4000-custom-525-bracket.html) and except being so silent... it gave me a constant 18.3MB/s (measured in SysSpeed) although I need to alter my Max Transfer mask as well :)
there is no amiga or hardisk controller for the Amiga which can offer 18mb/second transfer speed
maximum on the Amiga are 7 or 8 mb per second on Phase 5 scsi controllers
so you are lying or you are drunk loi...
do not use syspeed to test hardisk speed use sysinfo or diskspeed v4 on aminet
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It's not just the A3000 that is SCSI only, same for A4000T. Also, this lets you easily use SSD in Amiga, if you want that.
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use sysinfo
And there goes your credibility :hammer:
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[OT mode = ON]
there is no amiga or hardisk controller for the Amiga which can offer 18mb/second transfer speed
maximum on the Amiga are 7 or 8 mb per second on Phase 5 scsi controllers
so you are lying or you are drunk loi...
do not use syspeed to test hardisk speed use sysinfo or diskspeed v4 on aminet
Apparently you have no idea about CSPPC/CSmk3's UW SCSI controller mate.
Theoretically it can reach up to 40MB/s and I seen screenshots of UW HD's at 24MB/s.
Mine is UW SCSI but I putted a simple Ultra SCSI ACard that bottlenecks the speed to a max of 20MB/s.
Check my whole blog post here: http://mfilos.blogspot.com/2011/08/a4000-putting-all-together.html
and you can see the screenshot @ the end.
So... next time, better be sure and more polite before you accuse someone of lying or being drunk.
[/OT mode = OFF]
Sorry for the OT reply. Mousehouse again... thanks again for this interesting review.
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there is no amiga or hardisk controller for the Amiga which can offer 18mb/second transfer speed
I see you've never heard of UW SCSI in CS PPC.
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there is no amiga or hardisk controller for the Amiga which can offer 18mb/second transfer speed
maximum on the Amiga are 7 or 8 mb per second on Phase 5 scsi controllers
so you are lying or you are drunk loi...
do not use syspeed to test hardisk speed use sysinfo or diskspeed v4 on aminet
you seem pretty sure 'bout that...
(http://i55.tinypic.com/347vhae.jpg)
I suggest the next time you accuse someone of lying or being drunk you do your homework and actually know what you are talking about.
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[OT mode = ON]
Apparently you have no idea about CSPPC/CSmk3's UW SCSI controller mate.
Theoretically it can reach up to 40MB/s and I seen screenshots of UW HD's at 24MB/s.
Mine is UW SCSI but I putted a simple Ultra SCSI ACard that bottlenecks the speed to a max of 20MB/s.
Check my whole blog post here: http://mfilos.blogspot.com/2011/08/a4000-putting-all-together.html
and you can see the screenshot @ the end.
So... next time, better be sure and more polite before you accuse someone of lying or being drunk.
[/OT mode = OFF]
Sorry for the OT reply. Mousehouse again... thanks again for this interesting review.
like I said syspeed is not the tool to test hardisks or cpu speed or anything
it will give you incorrect and exaggerated numbers
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Man seriously... You must be right. We're all wrong for using these utilities for years now, so I rest my case :)
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sure! if someone insists so much it must be true, right...?
(http://i53.tinypic.com/mrz0rb.jpg)
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Man seriously... You must be right. We're all wrong for using these utilities for years now, so I rest my case :)
I'm right of course....18mb per second is a total exaggeration.....why do you not post a sysinfo screenshot instead ?
because like you said ...it will give you small numbers and you do not like it
that is not honest or real
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Super, thanks for this - should prove to be a very helpful guide for the community that are still running SCSI systems.
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I'm right of course....18mb per second is a total exaggeration.....why do you not post a sysinfo screenshot instead ?
because like you said ...it will give you small numbers and you do not like it
that is not honest or real
I don't care about numbers tbh. My system is very fast and that is all I care about.
I didn't post SysInfo screenshot cause it's an really old and outdated utility, and most people will agree that is not accurate comparing it with SysSpeed.
If I remember correctly the reading on SysInfo was between 14 and 15MB/s (which is lower than 18.3 but a lot more than the max 8MB/s that you said).
I'll post a screenshot once I get back home just to end this crap talk :)
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Thanks for the review.
I've got a couple of IDE to SCSI adaptors from Acard for use in my A3000 but it's out of action at the moment due to moving house.
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Will post a sysinfo and a sysspeed pic later today showing 30mb/s with a csppc
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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...
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(http://oi51.tinypic.com/20r3gvk.jpg)
Will upload the rest later.
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Nice!! That's how it's done ;-)
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Awesome results there Kawazu!!!
I ordered some time ago the UW ACard so I'm hoping for some better results as well :)
Oh damn! You used SysSpeed as well! It's not trustworthy! LOL
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I hope this will be OK then? :roflmao:
(http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/2296/dsc073031277x855.jpg)
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I'm right of course....18mb per second is a total exaggeration
You got served.
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that is a expensive solution and adds unnecesary hardware to the Amiga
for the 3000 is ok cause there is no ide
btw,please post a sysinfo screenshot with the drive speed tests because sysspeed'tests are not dependable
The amiga 4000 ide is slow as dirt and cpu intensive. Scsi is always better in almost every case(if its on the accelerator). I would say its almost manditory if you move any large files and don't want to wait a week.
Sys(MIS)info which is what veternan amigans have called it since it came out is not accurate on speed tests either.
diskspeed 4.2 i think may be a better alternative.
Mech
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there is no amiga or hardisk controller for the Amiga which can offer 18mb/second transfer speed
maximum on the Amiga are 7 or 8 mb per second on Phase 5 scsi controllers
so you are lying or you are drunk loi...
do not use syspeed to test hardisk speed use sysinfo or diskspeed v4 on aminet
You have no clue do you?. the Cyberstorm UltraWide scsi does up to 25MB/s as does the cyberstorm MKIII. People like you spread misinformation.
I use this with 32gb cf's and Acard 7720UW to get simular speeds.
You should learn a bit more before you shoot your mouth off.
@mousehouse Nice job on the 4000. Looks great!
Mech
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hey LaserBack ,
(http://i54.tinypic.com/x1dooj.jpg)
nexti time DO YOUR HOMEWORK before spreading crap-facts that are absolutelly false. Piru's post alone should shut you up (not to mention the other ppl that know more than you but let's pick the most famous one) but no...! you had to continue the crapfest...
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I think we should all start a Piru Appreciation Society or fan club! :D
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Will post a sysinfo and a sysspeed pic later today showing 30mb/s with a csppc
You didn't quite make 30MB/s :P. My SysSpeed 1st try results...
CreateFile 30.10 MB/s
WriteFile 32.10 MB/s
ReadFile 30.38 MB/s
RawRead 30.67 MB/s
These results would be better with PFS3 like...
Create 1282 Op/s
Open 3224 Op/s
DirScan 19314 Op/s
Delete 1733 Op/s
Seek/Read 8359 Op/s
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hey LaserBack ,
(http://i54.tinypic.com/x1dooj.jpg)
nexti time DO YOUR HOMEWORK before spreading crap-facts that are absolutelly false. Piru's post alone should shut you up (not to mention the other ppl that know more than you but let's pick the most famous one) but no...! you had to continue the crapfest...
the crapfest of the illusion now is not 18mb per second now is 30mb
I have seen only sysspeed tests which is a buggy and liar tool
but why nowbody have posted sysinfo screenshots...?
because sysinfo tells the true and offer real numbers...but nobody like it
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the crapfest of the illusion now is not 18mb per second now is 30mb
I have seen only sysspeed tests which is a buggy and liar tool
but why nowbody have posted sysinfo screenshots...?
because sysinfo tells the true and offer real numbers...but nobody like it
ARE YOU ON DRUGS? Post 24 IS using Sysinfo .....
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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...
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I also have the same adapter, hooked up to my CS060 MK1 with CybSCSI.
It took me a while to get there though - I am using the 8.7 ROM version (which I don't know if is publicly available - might be identical to the MK2/3 ROM version?) with a patch to skip sub-LUN handling.
And it works. 240G of SSD storage in an Amiga is ginormous...
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Not wanting to hijack thread but have a question. I have an Acard U/W SCSI to SATA bridge I just bought for my 4000T/CS MKIII. What drive to use? looking at:
" https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE3ZZ6289 "
Any problem with this drive? Cache size & .............
PS: or how big can I really go?
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I prefer WD drives. The limit with fully patched OS should be 2TB (on builtin IDE), I think. Anyway I managed to format 300Gb WD IDE. Only downside is, you need a lot of partitions due to pfs3 limit of their size, and each one eats some RAM.
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What drive to use? looking at:
I wouldn't touch spinning rust with a barge-pole unless I already had an SSD as my OS disk.
Now, an Amiga is probably 1000x more forgiving than other OSes, but I'm done with rattling, noisy and hot storage. I am guessing you can afford both if you have invested in an adapter like that??? Or there might be some specific reason you're looking at spinning disks (like slot space).
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dunno about others, but I like the HDD noise (floppy too!) in retro computers, speed doesn't matter so much. heat and power consumption does, but not too much.
SSDs are very robust, though, if you have important data.
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Not wanting to hijack thread but have a question. I have an Acard U/W SCSI to SATA bridge I just bought for my 4000T/CS MKIII. What drive to use? looking at:
" https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE3ZZ6289 "
Any problem with this drive? Cache size & .............
PS: or how big can I really go?
That *should* work fine. The cache size is largely irrelevant for our purposes. The size, 120GB, is well within sanity range. I have a 500GB and a 1TB running on the same Acard on non-Amiga systems. You'll want to check out a few other threads about large hard drives (over 4GB) and the requisite filesystems and their needs.
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Not wanting to hijack thread but have a question. I have an Acard U/W SCSI to SATA bridge I just bought for my 4000T/CS MKIII. What drive to use? looking at:
" https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE3ZZ6289 "
Any problem with this drive? Cache size & .............
PS: or how big can I really go?
7200.7? That's a really, really old model, and a terrible price. But good luck with that! :lol:
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7200.7? That's a really, really old model, and a terrible price. But good luck with that! :lol:
Mike has a point. If you really want something of that vintage, I'm certain I can scrounge up something in good condition and send it to you for shipping cost. PM me if interested.
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how big can I really go?
Oh. You should ask Olsen. I know he has written something about that somewhere. But I think it is way larger than any single drive you can get today (filesystem and driver being correct though).
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You would wish HDToolBox had a zoom feature with those large drives.
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OK, what about this one?
" https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5AD38B9135&cm_re=sata_hard_drive-_-22-136-697-_-Product ".
I wouldn't touch spinning rust with a barge-pole unless I already had an SSD as my OS disk.
Now, an Amiga is probably 1000x more forgiving than other OSes, but I'm done with rattling, noisy and hot storage. I am guessing you can afford both if you have invested in an adapter like that??? Or there might be some specific reason you're looking at spinning disks (like slot space).
There will be a CF on the IDE for the OS and a CDRW on the SCSI.