FAST ATA 4000

[Amigaz]

Im' thinking of buying the FAST ATA 4000 for my A3000 because I'm tired of the 1.5mb/s I'm getting from the onboard SCSI.
Will my boot HDD/sys HDD boot from the FAST ATA 4000?

[Amigaz]

Thomas wrote:

It is not the FastATA which takes ages, it is the onboard IDE on the motherboard. As long as there is any kind of drive attached to it, it will boot quickly but if there is no drive connected, the Kickstart will wait up to 30 seconds before it boots from another controller.

There is a hardware hack which solves this on Aminet. IIRC it is called IDE-Killer or similar.

The FastATA might speed up things a little. But it is not the raw transfer rate which makes the system fast. You should first consider replacing the file system by PFS3 or SFS before you decide to buy a new controller. Because optimising seek accesses will improve the speed more than increasing the transfer rate.

And of course the FastATA does not use DMA either, so you should have a fast processor (68060 recommended), too.

The best advantage of the FastATA is that its firmware supports 64 bit commands out of the box. So with an adequate file system (SFS, PFS3, FFS V43+) you are able to handle HDDs bigger than 4GB without any patch and no additional reset is needed.

Bye,
Thomas

I have PFS3 on all of my machines and 300 buffers for the SYS partion.
There's a '040@40mhz in my A3000

[Amigaz]

Using a FAST ATA 4000 here now on my A4000 and get checksum errors as soon as I switch to PFS3...seems like this controller only likes fFS
Can anyone else confirm this?

[Amigaz]

Thomas wrote:

Get a better IDE cable. An 80 wire UDMA 66 cable (one with different colored connectors) should work better.

Bye,
Thomas

That's what I'm using http://www.mycom.se/produkt/ide_kabel_ultra_dma_66_100_133__60cm_12981.html

It seem to work now, have PFS3 on my 250meg sys partition.
Only problem now is that I can't use two 20gig HD's which I can't install in hdtoolbox without getting errors during the install in either split on non split mode with fast ata prefs.

[Amigaz]

Effy wrote:
AMIGAZ : can you read dvd´s with AllegroCDFS  :-?

Haven't tried yet, have a 24x IDE cd-rom attached at the moment but will get a faster one soon so why not get a dvd-rom maybe?
Does it work for you? :-)

[Amigaz]

I think it's worth it if you want fast speeds from your cd-rom instead of the A4000's slow onboard IDE
If you have a CS MKII or MKIII you can use the SCSI on the board instead and connect a SCSI cd-rom and get fast transfers  and DMA.
I'm using the Fast ata now because I couldn't get a Seagate SCSI hd to work with my SCSI on my CS MKIII no mather what I did...guess I will have to start a topic about it or get another SCSI hd...guess I'm an "IDE-guy"  :-)