Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Marketplace => Topic started by: redrumloa on August 04, 2004, 11:34:45 PM
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Quick note, 3 more products added.
Catweasel ISA (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4598&item=5113949636) is back in stock for $65.
The Catweasel MKIII is sold out, and the Catweasel MKIV isn't out yet. If you need a Catweasel for your PC and it has an ISA, this is for you.
Buddha (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4598&item=5113954323) - $65.00
New item!
Silver Surfer (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4598&item=5113956817) - $40
New item!
Enjoy:-)
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Anyone have any experience with using the Buddha in an A3000? Since I have so many small (but still in the GB range) IDE hard drives I've collected over the years, I thought it would make more sense to use one of these than to seek out a larger SCSI drive.
Is the performance as good if not better that the A3000's SCSI? I'm sure this will also depend on what drive mechanism I choose to use.
What IDE specification does the Buddha compare to in the PC world? Is it considered UDMA? Judging by the cable in the photo, I know it isn't UDMA-66.
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Does anyone know if there is even an expected date for the Catweasel MKIV release? That will be the PCI version right? Thanks!
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Does anyone know if there is even an expected date for the Catweasel MKIV release?
October 2004.
That will be the PCI version right?
I think there is only the PCI version.
http://www.jschoenfeld.de/news/news99_e.htm
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Anyone have any experience with using the Buddha in an A3000?
I've used it in an Amiga 3000 before. It works quite well actually, and is shocking simple to setup:-) You can even boot off the Buddha.
Is the performance as good if not better that the A3000's SCSI?
That would depend on the drive largely. The performance seemed to be on level with the built in SCSI, but I honestly never ran benchmarks. The nice thing is you can use absurbly large HD sizes cheap, where SCSI would be expensive.
What IDE specification does the Buddha compare to in the PC world? Is it considered UDMA?
No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4. Even the newest UDMA drives are backwards compatible though, so they will work.
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ent0mbed wrote:
Does anyone know if there is even an expected date for the Catweasel MKIV release? That will be the PCI version right? Thanks!
There is no announced release date AFAIK, though it is my understanding I should have stock by mid October.
Yes this version will be PCI only. There will be Prometheus drivers though, so Classic Amiga users won't be left out:-)
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That sounds cool. Are there any improvements over the past models?
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x56h34 wrote:
That sounds cool. Are there any improvements over the past models?
Whoa boy, too much to quote here. I don't want to piss off the moderators:-D
CLICKY CLICKY (http://www.jschoenfeld.de/news/news99_e.htm)
See? Too many improvements to list here:-)
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That would depend on the drive largely. The performance seemed to be on level with the built in SCSI, but I honestly never ran benchmarks. The nice thing is you can use absurbly large HD sizes cheap, where SCSI would be expensive.
Quite true. Much more cost effective this way. I could adapt my 9GB UW SCSI HD internally but it runs too hot and noisy. My only concern with the Buddha is how to run the ribbon cable across the A3K's expansion slot card. Hopefully, it won't be obstructed once the case is put back on.
No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4. Even the newest UDMA drives are backwards compatible though, so they will work.
Sounds good. You may see an email from me regarding the eBay ad. :)
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@redrumloa
No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4.
PIO-3 or PIO-4? :-o
As a distributor of the Buddha card you should rather know that it works in PIO-0 only.
Due to the limitation of the Zorro II interface this card cannot even reach in A2/3/4000 computers the full PIO-0 speed.
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tjaoz wrote:
@redrumloa
No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4.
PIO-3 or PIO-4? :-o
As a distributor of the Buddha card you should rather know that it works in PIO-0 only.
Due to the limitation of the Zorro II interface this card cannot even reach in A2/3/4000 computers the full PIO-0 speed.
D'oh!! So, what does tha mean in terms of performance comparable to the A3K's SCSI? Have we just fallen a couple of notches?!?
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tjaoz:
I suppose you wanna recommend FastATA4000 at this point?
You make me sick, you know that?
Just for the record, I own both cards (Catweasel S-Class and FastATA4000 mk.2) and due to versatility of the S-Class card, I have decided to DEFINITELY...100% remove the FastATA4000 from my system, as the speed differece was barely noticeable between IDE/ATA operation between the Buddha and FastATA4000. Sure FastATA4000 was slightly faster, but it was honestly barely noticeable.
If you bothered to do a little research, you would have known that Buddha comes with a little speed setting utility which enables higher PIO modes than mode 0, if the user should require it, and thus makes the working speed with IDE devices almost on par with FastATA4000. What am I saying, of course you know this. It's just that you work for Elbox and you are required to slander all the other products out there. I bet that you are the same guy that checks the temperature in Krakow and determines whether it's cold or hot enough for discounts. :lol:
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@tjaoz
I know, I know. You want people to buy Elbox's Fast ATA controller, no suprise here.
BTW the Fast ATA controller is dreadful. Who the hell can live with 100% CPU load(!!!) on a 68060 and still only get 8MB/s?
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ive got a powerflyer gold in my miggy A1200, is that not DMA, and what sort of load does it put on my cpu, just curious, never looked into it
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tjaoz wrote:
@redrumloa
No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4.
PIO-3 or PIO-4? :-o
As a distributor of the Buddha card you should rather know that it works in PIO-0 only.
Due to the limitation of the Zorro II interface this card cannot even reach in A2/3/4000 computers the full PIO-0 speed.
Thats a load of crap! I used one in my A3000 for a few years in the form of a catweasel s class card. They are built together on that one. It got software that lets you select your PIO mode. I had it at 4 with no problems. It was MUCH faster then my internal SCSI but not near the speeds of the SCSI on my CSPPC card.
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JJ wrote:
ive got a powerflyer gold in my miggy A1200, is that not DMA, and what sort of load does it put on my cpu, just curious, never looked into it
100% CPU load, get a cpu monitoring utility and be amazed:-)
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serious, damm, i wish i never sold my blizzard IV 30/50 with scsi now, that was dma, never got to use it though, never had any scsi drives, bought the scsi bit, so i could add extra ram lol
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redrumloa wrote:
100% CPU load, get a cpu monitoring utility and be amazed:-)
The Buddha will take a huge CPU hit in faster modes just like the FastATA. This is due to the lack of DMA. The Buddha doesn' t have any magic fix for this problem. It might be less noticable because the Buddha is limited to ~2.8M/sec being a Zorro 2 only. The FastATA can go much faster, and thus uses more CPU.
I would recommend just getting a SCSIDE adapter and using the internal SCSI. Jeff- I have one that you can borrow to test if needed. That way you maintain just about the same speed, but you save a lot of CPU.
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Acill wrote:
Thats a load of crap! I used one in my A3000 for a few years in the form of a catweasel s class card. They are built together on that one. It got software that lets you select your PIO mode. I had it at 4 with no problems. It was MUCH faster then my internal SCSI but not near the speeds of the SCSI on my CSPPC card.
I'm going to have to agree with tjoaz here. The theoretical transfer rate of PIO-0 is 3.2MB/s. I don't think I've seen anything over 3MB/s on the Z2 bus (Buhdda bencharks show a max of around 2.8MB/s on Z3).
Although the Buddha might support switching modes, it can not out run them.
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adolescent wrote:
I'm going to have to agree with tjoaz here. The theoretical transfer rate of PIO-0 is 3.2MB/s. I don't think I've seen anything over 3MB/s on the Z2 bus (Buhdda bencharks show a max of around 2.8MB/s on Z3).
I take that to mean that the card supports Zorro 3 mode. Nice. Strange that this fact was omitted from the product web page. You would think this would be an important sales point. Although, it wouldn't appear to make much of a difference in real world performance. :)
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I don't think it supports Zorro 3 mode. The benchmark I saw was a Buddha on an A4000/040. I'd expect an A3000/060 to move more data than that. But, at 2.8MB/s it's not much faster than the internal SCSI and has much more CPU load.
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@x56h34
I suppose you wanna recommend FastATA4000 at this point?
Read my post once again and you will see what I really wrote.
You make me sick, you know that?
What is wrong with my post? Don't you like hard facts?
as the speed differece was barely noticeable between IDE/ATA operation between the Buddha and FastATA4000. Sure FastATA4000 was slightly faster, but it was honestly barely noticeable.
My FastATA gives me about 9.6MB/s. Sure, if I set the drive to PIO-0 it does not exceed 2.9MB/s.
FastATA working in PIO-0 is comparable to the Buddha in performance. :-)
If you bothered to do a little research, you would have known that Buddha comes with a little speed setting utility which enables higher PIO modes than mode 0
You are wrong. All Buddha modes have NOTHING to do with PIO modes. None of them is faster than the PIO-0 mode.
It's just that you work for Elbox and you are required to slander all the other products out there.
I do not work for Elbox and have never worked for them.
I simply do not like the way of making business by Redrumloa. IMHO it is not fair if someone who distributes 3rd party products writes untrue information about these products. Even if he adds the word "probably" before the information.
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@Acill
Thats a load of crap! I used one in my A3000 for a few years in the form of a catweasel s class card. They are
built together on that one. It got software that lets you select your PIO mode. I had it at 4 with no problems.
You missed up the PIO modes with the Individuals' custom modes! These custom modes have nothing to do with PIO modes. All Individuals custom modes are NOT faster than PIO-0 mode.
The cycle times for the PIO modes are as follows: PIO 0 - 600 ns, PIO 1 - 383 ns, PIO 2 - 240 ns, PIO 3 - 180 ns, PIO 4 - 120 ns.
The cycle time is the distance between the start of one read (or write) cycle and the start of next read (or write) cycle. During each read (or write) cycle, the IDE controller reads (or writes) two bytes from (or to) the hard drive. It means that in the PIO-0 mode the controller can transfer 2 bytes per 600 ns. (More about it you can find in the ATA spec http://www.t13.org/project/d1321r3.pdf)
The read (and write) cycle of the Zorro II card fitted in the Zorro slot of A2/3/4000 is 5 x 140 ns = 700 ns. It means that the Zorro II card (Buddha in this case) cannot transfer data from/to hard drive faster than 2 bytes per 700 ns, which is slower than in PIO-0 mode!!!
In the Buddha card, Individuals defined their custom timing for some hard drive signals. These modes are adjusted in the so-called "Buddha speed-register" ($7fe). The numbers you can find at http://www.schoenfeld.de/inside/Inside_BuddhaE.txt
Looking at these timings you can see that some of these modes slow down the hard drive much UNDER the PIO-0 mode ("Buddha speed-register" values: 1, 2, 6). If you set this register to the value 0, 3, 4, 5 or 7 (and the timing does not break your hard drive requirements) than you hard drive will work faster, but still SLOWER than the full PIO-0 speed.
You can check it taking your hard drive from Amiga to PC, setting PIO-0 and checking its speed. It will work not slower than when connected to the Buddha card, with Buddha fastest mode selected.
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What is all this babble about PIO and stuff.
Just come around with some realworld data everyone easily understands. As the ZII bus can not exeed 3 MB/s so the Buddha as a plain ZII card could not too.
My experiance is about 2.3-2.5MB/s in reallive in an 060 exuipted A2000.
CPU-Load is modearate but you sure feel the difference to SCSI.
All in all you can compare the buddha to the onboard IDE of an A1200/ A600 /A4000 only slightly faster with a little less CPU-load due to way better design and more compatible to modern drives.
Overall the Buddha is the best Zorro IDE controller you can get ( I had an FastATA4000 once, struggeld with it a few weeks and sold it off for half the price - and still felt sorry for the guy that bought it - as I came to the conclusion that I`m way better off with an IDE-SCSI Adapter if I want speed out of an IDE drive on an Amiga)
Haveing said that I won`t use IDE for harddrives at all on an Amiga anymore, as you miss every CPU cycle you lose.
Again, if you can`t affort decent SCSI equipment go for the Buddha.
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@Lemmink
What is all this babble about PIO and stuff. Just come around with some realworld data everyone easily
understands. As the ZII bus can not exeed 3 MB/s so the Buddha as a plain ZII card could not too. My experiance is
about 2.3-2.5MB/s in reallive in an 060 exuipted A2000.
What is so obvious, that is that Buddha supports only PIO-0, was not so clear to all here. No wonder if even this card's distributor -Redrumloa- stated that this card "probably" supports PIO3 and PIO4. :-D
Back to PIO modes, it is obvious that all PIO modes consume CPU time. Programmed I/O is performed by the system CPU. The system processor is responsible for executing instructions that transfer data to and from the drive.
And this is the reason why it is always better to have a controller supporting faster PIOs than PIO-0 alone. Remember that in PIO-4 every program to be read from the disk is loaded several times faster than in PIO-0. Of course, during its loading, the processor is heavily loaded with execution of the read operation, but this load lasts several times shorter than in PIO-0.
If for you the most important issue is that processor load is minimum during data being read from the disk, if you have a controller supporting fast PIOs (PIO-3 or PIO-4), you should reduce the priority of this controller driver. Then reading from the disk would slow down when your CPU is busy with a more important tasks, and will run at full speed when the CPU is not loaded. Period.
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@tjaoz
Fine, the Elbox solution may be faster than the Buddha solution, but it costs nearly ( not quite, but nearly ) twice as much as the Buddha which you, atleast in my head, also have to take into account...
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@tjaoz
Redrumloa is trustworthy and his customers harddrives are safe.
Elbox is untrustworthy, no matter how good their products are.
If you like them then fine but to the real people, they are a bunch of trojan writing rip off {censorship}.
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Paul_Gadd wrote:
@tjaoz
Elbox is untrustworthy.
If you like them then fine but to the real people, they are a bunch of trojan writing rip off {censorship}.
Could you please clarify/elaborate?
I just want to know what makes you say this.
Thanks
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I'mm sure he's reffering to some certain RDB-trashing code. :\
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@Cyberus
http://users.kymp.net/p305543a/elboxdecrypt/
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@Cyberus
They (Elbox) denied using RDB klling code in their software, then admitted to it, lied again, also never made a public apology , then claimed it was a anti piracy measure (nonsence), eventually removed it but the damage has been done and that alone makes them scum.
Then you have the thing with Hodges etc.
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@paul_gadd
Whats the thing with hodges? I seem to be out of the loop... :)
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{bleep}! Right, I can see where you're coming from now.
I thought this was meant to primarily a hobby platform?
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Orjan wrote:
@paul_gadd
Whats the thing with hodges? I seem to be out of the loop... :)
All of this is news to me also.
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@Orjan
Your math is a little off, but I think you have the right idea. If speed matters, get the FastATA as it is 4-5x faster (dependent on CPU). If you want the equivelent speed of the A4000 onboard IDE plus a clockport, then get the Buddha. Both take a significant CPU hit during transfers. I'd like to see a DMA IDE controller, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. For now the alternative is to use a SCSIDE adapter to take advantage of both DMA and cheap IDE devices.
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adolescent wrote:
@Orjan
Your math is a little off, but I think you have the right idea.
Well, here in sweden, an Elbox FastATA ZIII card costs 985 SEK ( roughly 105 € ) while a Buddha Flash costs 575 SEK ( roughly 60 € ). The Elbox card isn´t exactly x2 the price of the Buddha, but I only stated that it was _nearly_ twice as expensive... :-)
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Whats the thing with hodges? I seem to be out of the loop... :)
I wont get it to it all but Elbox tried to screw Hodges with the Poseidon and the Elbox driver policy, Elbox aint the good guys like the brainwashed Amigans want you to believe.
1 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/message/13580)
A quote
I stopped taking registrations, because Elbox treated me badly (as a summary) and I hoped, that they would change their mind. I should have known better. They kept selling their cards, even though they knew that the users wouldn't be able to use them. They didn't care at all about the users and their fate.
2 (http://www.morphzone.org/modules/news/print.php?storyid=290)
3 (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=44650)
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All this bad Elbox press has me concerned. Should I hold off on purchasing any of their *other* products?!? Unfortunately, there aren't many other companies offering Tower and PCI expansion kits.
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I've done a lot of reading and have followed the arguments, tiresome that they are, and am just :-?