Zorro III USB - Deneb

[Boot_WB]

Fantastic news!

REALLY looking forward to having one of these.

Please let us know when it is ready for release.

Thanks



Rich

[Boot_WB]

sandpiper wrote:

As for the person complaining about price. This isn't like a cheap PCI USB card made in bulk. Think about the money you can save by using this card. This card will quite litterally allow me to expand my A4000D for less money than it costs.

Good point. Think of the low priced peripherals that will be available to you...CHEAP usb mice, keyboards, thumb drives, hard disks etc etc. No need to spend $40-$50 for Amiga keyboard or mouse adapters or buy expensive used Amiga keyboards & mice. A good basic Logitech usb optical wheelmouse costs about $20. Just plug it in.

It's more the cheap soundcards (no need to pay £50 for a Toccata) and ethernet (no need to pay £70 for an x-surf) that will make the real savings. £10 each for a ethernet and soundcard? You've already saved £100 - AND you now have a top USB card in your machine.

Plus, booting from flashrom, and fast (and modern) storage devices - have you seen the price of 50-pin scsi drives lately? May be obsolete, but that means "rare" in Ebayspeak. You have to pay a (relative) fortune for a 2GB drive that may have spent 5 years in a server getting thrashed 24 hours a day. Now you can use a brand new SATA drive straight from the Deneb.

I'd be interested to know what the transfer speed from USB Ethernet to a Deneb mounted hard drive would be. Does it bypass Amiga memory completely? Can it achieve 100Mb/s ethernet transfer speeds? Are USB gigabit lan adapters supported?

[Boot_WB]

@Jose
When I say "a (relative) fortune" I mean per GB, in comparison to (for example) a higher capacity PATA or SATA drive.

I'm not saying that you're sitting on a fortune ;-)

[Boot_WB]

Jose wrote:
If you have an A4000T chances are you already have an accelerator with a scsi2 controler (3 if the CyberstormPPC) so you can just disable the onboard scsi2 controler for ZIIIDMA with the Deneb.

My plan exactly! :-D

[Boot_WB]

@Platon42

Chris, just wondering about the following scenario:

I'm intending to have a USB>NIC adapter, and a USB>SATA adapter attached to the Deneb when it arrives.

If I'm downloading a large file from the internet, onto the SATA drive, what will be the limiting factor on the download speeds?

Will the transfer be via zorro and memory:

NIC > Deneb > Zorro bus > memory followed by Memory > Zorro bus > Deneb > SATA ?

or will the transfers be direct between the two devices?

NIC > Deneb > SATA ?

I do not pretend to have your and Michael's level of expertise, but as this will affect transfer speeds in this situation, I'm curious to know.

Thanks



Rich

[Boot_WB]

Thanks for the quick reply, I don't know enough about TCP to realise this myself.

I was thinking along the lines that once a request for (for example) a file has been sent, the data being received could simply be sent to (for example) a hard drive.

On reflection, I suppose that since data is received in packets it makes sense that the TCP stack would have to receive, reassemble and direct these packets to the appropriate location (memory or hard drive).

Thanks for the info



Rich