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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Cyberus on September 22, 2003, 06:40:01 PM
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I was just wondering...I have always been a little obsessed with SCSI, and always think about how cool it would be to have an ultra wide SCSI interface and drive for high transfer speeds...but is hard disk speed really THAT important?
Obviously for servers, for direct to hard disk recording, etc it is...but is my, and no doubt others', obsession with speed a but needless? I mean, if I have an 060 in my A1200 and still use the mobo IDE controller, will I even notice the fact that it ain't as fast as it could be?
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well lets say you are a gamer...
YES hdd speed is important , and most of all DMA transfers! .
lets say you are a browser .. and cache is on hdd ... yes hd speed is important.
old ide controllers in amiga is crap!..
scsi is better but uw scsi is just great :)
cheers
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It makes a bigger difference on the PC but yes it makes a difference. :-D
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yep, hd speed is very important, to me anyway. iam using eide express and the old driver was running about 2.3 mips then i received an update driver, now iam getting nearly 5 mips. made a big differance...
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Yes, HD speed is very significant, provided your IDE interface can keep up.
On an A1200, using the internal port, HD speed is irrelevant. On modern hardware you certainly feel the difference when using a fast drive.
Incidentally, the gap between SCSI and IDE is also much smaller on modern hardware. In fact, you need a really pressing reason to choose SCSI these days, as IDE drives and interfaces are pretty fast.
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..but is hard disk speed really THAT important?
YES!! Well, to some more than others!
To me, HDD speed is very important, one of the more important factors these days.
Some people seem to be okay with slower computers etc.
...but is my, and no doubt others', obsession with speed a but needless?
You have to remember that it's not speed just for the hell of it. It's peoples time we're talking about here.
I have better things to do that sit around and wait for computers to boot and programs to compile.
will I even notice the fact that it ain't as fast as it could be?
Sure! In time you will surely notice.
Try this experiment:
Step one: Set up a fast HDD with the OS(etc.). Use it for three months.
Step two: Set up a slow HDD with the OS(etc.). Put the fast HDD aside, and start to use the slow one.
You will notice a difference, and after using the fast stuff for a while, slow computer hardware will most likely irritate you!
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Speed is important but efficient transfer is even moreso in my book. DMA should not be considered a luxury, it should be standard.
As it goes, the standard IDE interface in the 600/1200/4000 is just bobbins - programmed IO, heavy CPU usage. Not pretty...
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Incidentally, the gap between SCSI and IDE is also much smaller on modern hardware. In fact, you need a really pressing reason to choose SCSI these days, as IDE drives and interfaces are pretty fast.
The main advantage of SCSI these days is that it is Asyncronous.
SCSI is really better for multitasking than IDE, and that is where it will really perform.
If like me, you have several programs accessing the HDD at the same time(well not exactly the same time - but you know what I mean) you will certainly benefit from a SCSI HDD. I'm the sort of person who likes to load several programs at once, and an IDE HDD goes bezerk and takes much longer than a SCSI one.
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Cyberus wrote:
I was just wondering...I have always been a little obsessed with SCSI, and always think about how cool it would be to have an ultra wide SCSI interface and drive for high transfer speeds...but is hard disk speed really THAT important?
Obviously for servers, for direct to hard disk recording, etc it is...but is my, and no doubt others', obsession with speed a but needless? I mean, if I have an 060 in my A1200 and still use the mobo IDE controller, will I even notice the fact that it ain't as fast as it could be?
I currently get about 70 MB/s (not a misprint) from my IDE raid, thats 3 uncompressed streams of D1 video out my VT[3]. Is that faster that what you are going to see from a single Ultrawide SCSI?? Yeah it is, in fact I have those in there too, its just until I Raid0 them together, they are slower then the IDE configuration. EIDE & SATA raid PCI cards are easily available and prevent most of the shortcomings of those formats.
-Tig
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I currently get about 70 MB/s (not a misprint) from my IDE raid, thats 3 uncompressed streams of D1 video out my VT[3]. Is that faster that what you are going to see from a single Ultrawide SCSI?? Yeah it is, in fact I have those in there too, its just until I Raid0 them together, they are slower then the IDE configuration. EIDE & SATA raid PCI cards are easily available and prevent most of the shortcomings of those formats.
-Tig
I'm not saying I doubt you, but I would love to know the exact details of your configuration.
Especialy drive models/speeds etc. :-)
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Yes, HD speed makes the world of difference. Even on a system without VM, it makes the whole system feel more responsive. In a world of steadily increasing code size, any interface that uses CPU time to poll it is dead, dead, dead - and with good reason.
As to SCSI vs IDE, it's pretty established that modern SCSI is better in almost every way than modern IDE. The actual interfaces don't have much difference, although SCSI has a slight technical advantage still (although transfers use no CPU time on SCSI or UDMA-IDE, drive commands still do on IDE. SCSI is also better with multiple devices).
What's more important to remember is that SCSI drives are built to server specs and have far better components and technology than IDE drives, which are generally only built to desktop specs. The only IDE drive which could claim to come close to server level is the Western Digital Raptor, and it falls quite seriously short of the big boys at the top.
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thanks for your replies guys
when I asked, "is it THAT important" I didn't mean is it totally unimportant, it's just that I was thinking some users may notice the differences more than others. I mean, for many users fast HD access may be just a luxury, rather than a necessity, if you gather what I mean
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Cyberus wrote:
... it's just that I was thinking some users may notice the differences more than others. I mean, for many users fast HD access may be just a luxury, rather than a necessity, if you gather what I mean
Sure, it's kind of like those people who are okay with 486's, and want to run all the latest apps on them.
Or people who don't know the difference between a sports car and a dumb old stationwagon.
IMAO some people just don't deserve to use computers, if you don't want speed.... ...nah only joking. ;-)
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The line between luxury and necessity usually depends how patient you are and what you want to do. ;)
But supposing you got a coldfire (just for the sake of argument) for an Amiga and wanted to watch some divx. The coldfire might be able to play it, but the drain on it caused by the Amiga IDE would make watching divx impossible.
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I Got more than 80MB/sec on a Ultra 320 10k RPM single SCSI hard drive
attached on a U320 controller....so YES, IDE is cheaper but still far
long from SCSI performance... And I even didn't try 15K rpm drives...
Moreover IDE raid is not sompliant to standard, so forget this
####...Everything which is not standard is not reliable... So I hope
you won't lose any video on your VT[3]...
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Depends on what you are going to use your computer for.
SCSI is very nice, if you many transfers going from multiple disks at the same time, it is then you start noticing the weakness of the ide bus. If you do video editing and such, then you would benefit alot from a faster disk. :-)
I i could afford it, i would have only scsi in my system, but sadly im poor so i gotta settle with ide disks. :cry:
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FALCON1 wrote:
I Got more than 80MB/sec on a Ultra 320 10k RPM single SCSI hard drive
attached on a U320 controller....so YES, IDE is cheaper but still far
long from SCSI performance...
Why not try SATA-IDE 10K RPM drives?
My single UDMA 7200 RPM 80Gb yields ~55Mb/s, (without taking RAID into an account i.e. dual 7200 RPM 80Gb setup).
Moreover IDE raid is not sompliant to standard, so forget this
####...Everything which is not standard is not reliable... So I hope
you won't lose any video on your VT[3]...
Most of IDE-RAID IDEs have RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 1/0.
PS; Mean time of error is generally lower with IDE HDs than SCSI types (i.e. but you get what you pay)...
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I feel that HD speed is one of the biggest bottlenecks in my Amiga setup. Sure, the Z-IV busboard and the CV64/3D can hardly handle Doom. Sure, the 060/50MHz isn't exactly top of the line anymore. But all file system operations are a real pain. Sure, my HD needs a good defragmentation but at about 1.8-2.0MB/s (SysInfo) that's what slows things down.
I remember when Amigas booted in just a few (around 10) seconds. My Amiga takes around 30-40 seconds to boot, then load ToolManager graphics, backgrounds... All file requesters are dog slow and thank god for MCP's font cache.
I'd switch to SCSI any day if I could afford it!
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when i still had my machine, i used to have the boot partitions and system apps on a 5Gb IDE drive with 256k cache (ok not alot of cache by todays multi megabyte standard but its was fast when i bought it), but the trouble was, the digital broadcaster NEEDED scsi for video recording / playback. so fine fine saved up and got a PPC card with ultrawide drives. and thought my machine takes SO long to boot. PPC drivers, GFX card drivers, librarys etc etc. and i had so much space that wasn't being used. so shuffled the boot partition and apps onto one of my video drives.
ok so FFS isn't the most effective filesystem around, but my boot times were halved, and heretic2 took about half the time to load levels... would NEVER go back to IDE on the amiga.. but thats all my CD/SX32 has.... on the PC i appriciate its a different matter, what with UDMA33/66/100/133/150. and as for that IDE raid stuff someone was talking about. thats great! and what amiga is that on? its not. so not relevant.
plus compairing a raid system to a single disk is a touch unfair. i was well happy with 25Mb a second (untweeked - not playing around with phase5's scsi tools) on my amiga. 36Mb tweeked. :-D
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I have a catweasel/Buddha Ide controller on my 4000 and have had problems with it. What kind of speed does this controller have? I also have the Cyberstorm MKIII 060 with the SCSI ultra wide and since I have had problems with the BUDDHA I was just going to change over to the SCSI ultra wide. I have one hard drive in it that is scsi and just need to get the correct cables to get it working.
:-?
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We used to have everything on SCSI for speed but these days IDE is more than fast enough. Of course if we are talking Amiga IDE that may be another matter. Interestingly the DPS Personal Animation Recorder, a device that needed superfast access used a dedicated IDE setup even if in those days SCSI was the norm for big box amigas.
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We used to have everything on SCSI for speed but these days IDE is more than fast enough.
That's impossible tintin! Nothing can even be 'fast enough', let alone 'more than fast enough'!
Crazy talk! :crazy:
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:-D :-D :-D
Okay, okay, I stand corrected...
Besides, I never claimed NOT to be crazy :-D
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Yes HD speed DOES MATTER!
Even if you use your Amiga only for DTP or Gaming HD speed makes a difference.
Internet Browsers use cache and the faster the HD, the better the performance of the browser will be.
(unless you use a 3200 modem :-) )
Games load faster, Images load faster, Videos load faster - and even better, huge videos will paly really smooth!
As for SCSI, I believe that nothing is better than a Seagate Cheetah, but if you dont have the money for SCSI you could try UATA (or SATA). Today's IDE HDs are fast enough for any use.