GVP HC+8 Problems - very odd!

[patrik]

@iMacMiga:

Not to be an arse, but the HC+8 will actually even perform a bit worse than the onboard IDE-controller in an A4000.

The A4000 IDE-controller can reach above 3MB/Sec with a modern harddrive and a processor-card with good access to the motherboard bus and that is more than the HC+8 which manages a maximum of 2.2 - 2.4MB/Sec with a modern drive.

Then ofcourse the HC+8 is a dma controller which the IDE-controller in the A4000 aint and should thus lessen the cpuload. But as it is a Zorro2 dma controller, it wont in a Zorro3-machine be able to do dma transfers to/from the fastest memory, but only to slow chip-ram or Zorro2-fastram. This will force the cpu to work on the data in very very slow memory which removes all the advantage of a dma controller.

So my advice would be to skip the HC+8 and the SCSI-drives if they are causing trouble and just use an IDE-drive in your A4000 instead.


/Patrik

[patrik]

@iMacMiga:

Yeah, it works fine without any drives attached, just unjumper J4 to disable autoboot or else it will search for the non-existant drive(s) for quite some time each boot.

When you disable the autoboot jumper it wont load the gvpscsi.device from the rom on the HC+8 anymore so if you then want to use say a zip-drive then, just drop the "gvpscsi" device-driver from the Expansions drawer on the HC+8 drivers disk into the Expansions drawer of your Workbench partition.


/Patrik