Best storage I can get? FastATA MK-VI 4000 CF/SATA

[danbeaver]

The FastATA with the latest ROMs will be no faster than a good SCSI-2 setup at <10 MB/s despite the PIO mode of 4 on a mode 4 drive.  The Zorro 3 Bus tops out at 13 MB/s and I suppose some intensive CPU cycles in multitasking overhead conversion accounts for the rest.  The SCSI-3 bus on the CS MK3 and CSPPC will yield up to 35 MB/s if you decide to trade up; of note these CS devices use the accelerator bus.  Using a Compact Flash 2.0 device with 100 ns minimal cycle time in mode 5 still goes no faster in my testing.  I'm just guessing that a GREX 4000 board. that also bypasses the Zorro 3 (actually Buster limited), with the drivers for an IDE or SCSI card might get you higher transfers than a Zorro board.

[danbeaver]

The Fastlane Z3 board would be nice if you got one that worked with your system, but they won't give you 256 MB (at least no one has figured it out yet), and I could never get the SCSI to work (from 2 different Fastlane's boards and 3 different Amiga 4000's).  See the various forums for the "FastLane Z3 Blues."

[danbeaver]

@Chris -- The converters from SCSI-3 to SATA take a conversion "hit" of about 3 MB/s, so a native U320 15000k HDD under OS3.9 will saturate the bus at 35 MB/s vs 31 using an SSD SATA with conversion.

@Thread - - In my opinion a Buddha Phoenix Edition of 3 to 5 MB/s doubles the number of IDE ports and speed of the onboard IDE for about $100 USD and in a cost to benefit ratio gives a good option, although the FastATA will be new and easily available, just don't believe the hype.

[danbeaver]

The CS MK2 will easily give 8 MB/s in most setups and so will the FastATA 4000 with selected HDD's/CF cards. Zorro 2 bandwidth is limited as noted in the thread, but as also noted (by me) the CS MK2 SCSI resides on the accelerator bus, not the Zorro and is limited by SCSI-2.  

Although I have done a bunch of benchmarks and reported the OS4 vs OS3.9 numbers in the hyperion classic forum, I own a Buddha Phoenix (new Amigakit release), a FastATA 4000 latest version, CS MK2, CS MK3, and  CSPPC; however my real mantra is, "If is seems fast, then it is."  

The accelerator really helps makes is seem fast and anything above SCSI-1 and the Amiga built-in IDE does as well, so pick something that fits your budget (I always spend days making decision like that) and go for it; in the meantime, overclocking a CS MK2 to 66MHz is fine since you don't have the SCSI module to worry with (or higher if you can find fast RAM).

OFF TOPIC and as an aside: on both my A4000T and X1000 running OS4.1, you can use a SIL3112/4 PCI card, that's not fast, but gives you easy access to SATA drives (on the X1000 I use 3 SSD's on the MB SATA, but a 1 TB backup on the SIL3114).  I have a 1 TB backup drive on the SIL3114 in my A4000T and a SATA DVD-R/W.

Off topic: I consider the CS MK2 and SCSI module a "pair" and if I can buy only one, I wait to complete the pair with the other.  Cable routing is hell, but they are nice!

[danbeaver]

The Atlas series (originally Maxtor, and now found as Dell, Quantum, etc) of SCSI-3 drives are very quiet, fast, reliable, and almost always work on Amiga SCSI interfaces. Old, crappy drives can be loud, but not the good quiet ones.  Most of those SCSI-3 drives on eBay came from servers and were designed to be work horses it the Server Farms of just a few years back.

That being said, today's 128 GB SSD's cost next to nothing and with about $6 USD IDE<->SATA converter (given luck and a fair moon) can be used as well; I have 3 cheap SSD's in my X1000 (one dedicated to Ubuntu) and use a 240 GB on my Laptop and for the OS on my home-build office PC.  Keep in mind that the Amiga in all forms present and past has the bus completely saturated by any SSD.

[danbeaver]

I don't know what drive you were using, but with the CS MK2 SCSI I've gotten 8.2 and 8.3 MB/s with a Maxtor Atlas (SCSI-3 and adapter).  Rotational speed matters little here.

All my SCSI drives are Atlas's as the other, crappier makes have died over the past 20+ years.

[danbeaver]

5 MB/s with the 4091 or Fastlane (configured for lowest CPU use) in conjunction with the overclocked MK2. :-) You're probably aware, the SCSI module doesn't work with the MK2 overclocked, hence talk of the 4091/Fastlane.

There is an adapter kit you can buy, which makes it possible to run the '060 at 2x the busclock. So, for example, you could run a Rev 6 '060 at 80 or 100MHz, while the SCSI and RAM on the MK2 run at 40 or 50MHz. This should allow the SCSI to work with an overclocked processor. (AFAIK it's been done already by some members on the German a1k.org forum.)

I don't own an A4091 and I could never get either one of my FastLane's SCSI to work; all I can tell you are my results with the SCSI on a CS MK2, CS MK3, and a CSPPC.  The CS MK2 achieved 8.2 and 8.3 MB/s with 2 different Atlas SCSI-3 HDD's (one of which was a U160 and the other a U320).  My CS MK2's were connected to the accelerator bus (via the accelerator) and were not limited by Zorro bandwidth.

[danbeaver]

No, but I can burn an 8.5 ROM for them, as I did for the 2 I couldn't get to work (the ROMs were correct by the way, I sold a couple at cost).

You can tell once you get them in a machine, or while in the firmware state.

[danbeaver]

Thanks for the heads up, I appreciate that.

I have one already in shipping, should hopefully be here Monday with the 8.5 ROM already installed.

I've still got my feelers out for a MKII SCSI module though.

BTW, I've got my other 4000 with a Warp Engine 040/40 reinstalling on it's new 10k RPM Hitachi 73GB.  That drive actually tested a consistent 0.5MB faster than a Seagate 15K RPM 36GB drive for some reason. Possibly the size/density gave it an edge.

I only had SysSpeed to test with until I get it all installed again, but it was showing a solid 8.8 to 9.3 MB/s on both the read and write tests.

Your numbers above likely reflect the larger cache/buffer that larger HDD's have: the more storage space = more surface area to seek the data, and this would cause a drop in speed, so a larger buffer can hold and transmit more data as the drive seeks it out.

Hardstep, the number from an Adaptec PCI are disappointing; they are in the 1.8 to 2 MB/s range.  This is probably the way the Mediator implements a pseudo DMA (double transfer).  Try it yourself and see what numbers you get, as an N=1 in statistics is anecdotal at best.