GVP A4008 SCSI controller speed?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

So you're asking if the GVP A4008 is faster than the stock motherboard IDE of an A4000, correct?

Pretty much 100% yes, unless you've got something badly misconfigured.  Obviously this opens up a whole other can of worms, you can research things like the FastATA (a faster IDE interface), or various Zorro III SCSI cards that are faster than the Zorro II on the A4008, and then what kind of drive you have connected to both (which obviously makes a huge difference), etc.

But if your choices are between those two only, and all else being the same, I'd go with the SCSI card.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You'll need to prep it in HDToolbox and set it's boot priority relative to your existing drive, but otherwise, yes.

Disclaimer: something could always go wrong.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ok that brings me to my next question. What is the best way to clone my old drive onto the new SCSI drive? This is an area I'm not familiar with on the Amiga.

I was going to simply copy the files over.

Right.  What Paul said.  Prep the new drive and copy the files over.  Should be good to go!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

In slow motion: "Noooooo!!!"  Don't use GVP FaaastPrep!  It's only designed for hard drives from the '80s, and will ruin anything else!  Use the latest version of HDToolbox to prep your drive.  If you use SFS or PFS and have patched your OS you can create partitions as big as you want. But for the sake of "not having to bang your head against a wall figuring stuff out", make it 4GB makes it easy.

I usually do 1 partition of around 500MB for Workbench, one of 1-2GB for Work:, sometimes one for Documents,  and one for games.  Split it up, don't make just one big partition, and again - keeping it inside the first 4GB keeps it compatible.  

Edit: You do have 3.9 though, so you should already have all the tools you need...

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ok, thanks.
I'm trying to do this within my OS 3.1 so I should switch over to the 3.9 OS and do it from there?

IMHO you should always use the latest version of the OS, especially since 3.9 contains a lot of improvements for large drive support.  You are going to put 3.9 on your new drive, right?  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I made an awful video recently.  This might help you.  

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=68805

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster so I'm going to have to stick with 3.1
I use 3.9 for when I'm not using the Toaster and just want to play games.

I keep forgetting that.  Dang!  No one ever figured out a solution why it doesn't work?  Is it a particular library, or something?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ok, I've been trying to do this without driving everyone crazy with questions but can't find the answer so...
In OS 3.9 when I go to HD toolbox it does not "see" the drive on the GVP controller. What am I missing?

Are you sure the drive is terminated correctly?

Are you sure it's scanning gvpscsi.device and not just scsi.device?  You can change this via tooltypes if you need to, but as far as I can recall 3.9 is pretty smart and should scan all available devices.  Heck, it even found the USB devices on my system.    I'd check termination first.

I'm sure you already confirmed that the drive is powering up, right?  :rofl:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

The drive shows up under OS3.1 using the GVP tools and yes its terminated.
Do I still have to install anything to OS3.9 or is that all included (for 3.1 you had to install the GVP device stuff)
Where do I change the tooltypes?

You change the tooltypes by right-clicking on the icon and selecting Icons -> Information.  You can see in this screenshot of mine that I have it set to "ASKDEVICE" so it will scan everything.  If I wanted to I could specify a specific device by removing the paranthesis from the next line, and changing that, i.e., to gvpscsi.device.

Just being honest here, please take this as constructive criticism, it makes me a little nervous that you're trying to change these settings without even knowing what tooltypes are.  Don't worry though, we'll get you squared away.  

Also, what version of the GVP ROM are you using?  If it's anything below 4.15 or the GuruROM, stop right now and upgrade that first.  You can buy 4.15 ROM's on ebay or amibay for under $20.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You want to buy from this guy, tjlazah:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-4091-GVP-or-Supra-Series-III-SCSI-ROM-update-/131422770900

GVP 4.15 ROM, if you have anything below that.  Guru ROM is better but almost impossible to find because it requires a small PCB interface between the chip and the board.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You would use either the ASKDEVICE tag or the named device tag.  As you can see in my screenshot I'm using the ASKDEVICE, and it's polling everything.  Even my RapidRoad USB interface (and all it's associated options) shows up.

So if you wanted to try the named device option, you'd change it to:

(ASKDEVICE)
SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=gvpscsi.device

(no paranthesis on the second line)

Then it should scan just that particular device.

Pretty certain that the .device for GVP controllers is stored in the ROM, so it should be loaded at bootup.  Try this:  run SysInfo (latest version 4.0 can be downloaded here:  http://sysinfo.d0.se/ )  and scroll through till you see your list of installed expansions or devices.  Are you seeing a gvpscsi.device at all (when you're booted up in 3.9)?

No worries man, I took a nearly 10-year break from owning any Amiga hardware, it it all came back to me "fairly" fast, LOL.  

As a last thought, when you run HDToolbox your motherboard controller shows up at least, right?  (will probably be named scsi.device even though it's technically IDE).