Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: That useless A590 switch 4!  (Read 4177 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline mechy

Re: That useless A590 switch 4!
« on: August 08, 2013, 12:04:58 AM »
Quote from: gizmo350;743976
Well, I tried every combination of ID's (nothing on the top term pins) and that seems to have no effect at all - ID seems to do nothing. I tried (like yours) jumper pins 1 and 4 (ID 0 and term) and still does the same thing. Well, maybe Mechy will see this and have an answer - at least it works! Also, 3GB partition seems to work just fine with OS2.1... I installed a few games from floppy...  :razz: Thanks sooo much for you helpfulness Mike! Lemme know if anything else comes to mind...


The top 2 pins of the row of jumpers farthest away from the scsi connector end is termination-the 3 sets below are scsi ID.. put a jumper block on those 2 top pins to enable termination,which should be enabled if its the only drive on the A590. You need  no other jumpers on the scsi ID pins,which will leave it device #0.

the PCD drives label shows all the settings for ID's/termination right on the drive.

The reason it is taking a long time is the 2091/590 is a slow controller,and although luns work for the most part they aren't handled very intelligently- it takes forever to scan 7 luns per scsi ID of 0-6(so 49 checks approx). A couple ways to possibly fix this are with HDtoolbox.

I am doing this from memory so i may not be overly accurate here- in the hdtoolbox tooltypes you will find and can set these values:
MAX_SCSI_LUN=5    (or 6 of you have a 6 slot reader)
MAX_SCSI_UNIT=1  (this assumes you set the scsi ID to 0 -no jumpers).

save the settings and then run hdtoolbox and save your partitions again so these take effect- i seem to think they are saved in the rdb from memory.

scsi scans from device 0 on up,so finding a drive early may help boot time.

this will give a slight speed up,but if you want access to all the slots,luns will always be slow on the A590. The gvp doesnt suffer from this.

if you want the quickest boot its best to only use the pcmcia slot with cf adapter and turn off luns.

Speeds you will see will vary quite a bit based on scsi controller,cf,sd,sm,etc card used, and filesystem used. FFS is very slow.
The a590 will be good doing 1 to 2MB in speed.

It is doubtful to exceed 4MB/s (although the manufacturer claims 4-5MB/s). i have reached 3.9MB/s using sfs and a transcend class 10 -4GB sd card in the sd slot with the card reader hooked to the cyberstorm MKIII uwscsi(with proper highbyte adapter). No idea why this was slightly faster than the cf slot.

I never recommend using hdinsttools on any amiga drives, this program creates a non standard rdb that is no longer compatible to the C= standard. I spent much time/tech help finding odd troubles users had who bought the scsicard readers because of hdinsttools.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2013, 12:08:17 AM by mechy »
 

Offline mechy

Re: That useless A590 switch 4!
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2013, 02:21:30 PM »
Quote from: mfilos;744000
It actually does 30 blinks before the drive can boot (at least in my case).
Putting the tooltypes didn't seem to fix the boot delay sadly.
Maybe putting an active terminator on the back of the A590 could be a good idea but I have none atm. I might get one from eBay and if I have any difference I'll report back.

My memory may be fuzzy here, my 590 is buried somewhere and i cant find it atm or i would pull it out and test.

the passive termination is fine on the PCD drive. This is not a problem,and nothing to do with termination,its simply a matter of the 590 being very slow and its poor implimentation of lun scanning.
I had sworn setting the tooltypes and resaving the partitions to the rdb would speed it a bit(it still will not be fast like proper scsi controllers) but again i may be confusing it with another controller..

This slow lun scanning doesn't happen on A3000 scsi,warpengine,cyberstorms,gvp stuff etc.

I do wonder if someone could hack the roms to improve the lun scan. It may just be the hardware can't do it faster. I suspect its just down to a case of a old, slow controller that was not very good to begin with.
 

Offline mechy

Re: That useless A590 switch 4!
« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2013, 05:27:51 AM »
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;744025
HDToolBox worked great for me with mine.  If you disable the LUN support, won't you also lose the option to use multiple cards (think it will limit you to just the CF in the PCMCIA slot)?

Have you considered doing the 14MHz hack, @Mechy - think that might speed things up for him any?

There's some info on it here, with links to other threads for additional info:

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=19260


From memory if you turn off luns you cant get to them period. I would love someone to prove me wrong though :D

These drives are hot swappable,you can change cards on them at will but BE SURE you dont pull it when writing to it or you will probably scramble it.
it is probably best to leave the card with the OS in always and just hot swap another slot. on most other accelerators with scsi the disk change is recognized(it takes a few secs in some case),but on the 590 you may have to issue a DISKCHANGE command.

overclocking the scsi chip should speed things up a bit but i doubt it will be "fast".

The latest WD or AMD scsi chip is a wise addition also,it sometimes fixes some troubles(although slow lun scan is not technically trouble and most likely will not be changed).

I have noticed some 2091/590's have different version of DMAC chips. i wonder if this explains why i see some different behavior between some 2091's? anyone have any thoughts on this?

Using FAT formatted cards:

It seems the guys over at EAB got FAT95 to work on the card reader,I knew this should be possible but never had time to pursue it. the thread is here:

http://eab.abime.net/support-apps/67430-fat95-a590-scsi-cf-using-pcd-50b.html

I used a utility called scsipcmcia.lha many years ago on the pcd-25b,but it does not work on the newer drives. The mountlist on the eab thread should work fine instead(DISKCHANGE command may be needed). the info is in the fat95 docs i believe.  
This addition allows you to read fat formatted cards on the scsi card readers like you can on the 600/1200.

Most proper scsi controllers poll the scsi bus every so many seconds and see diskchanges so issuing the DISKCHANGE command should not be needed.
 

Offline mechy

Re: That useless A590 switch 4!
« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2013, 04:19:22 PM »
Quote from: gertsy;744247
I've noticed the delayed startup too. Termination on or off didn't seem to make a diff.  Will try this on my A590. Interested in how you guys secured your PCD unit inside the A590. Mine's loose at the moment will have to get some spacers to lift it up so the molex power plug in the PCD hovers above the plug in the A590 CB.  That's the only way to close the case.

There some pics on this thread how i mounted mine originally. the top and front bezel can be popped off of the pcd card readers for a bit more clearance. It is a tight fit and you will need to use it with luns and no pcmcia to cf adapter.

The best thing to do with it may be to put it in a external scsi case so you can have access to it always.