Most bullet-proof drive solution?

[Crumb]

For desktop (mostly development, so lots of writes) use on either a 4000D or 4000T, what is the most reliable, but still fast drive configuration to use?

First of all I wouldn't use old 4GB drives because these are prone to errors due to their age... many of them are 13 years old. CF is said to work well and although it's supposed to degrade with writtings but I guess you'll be able to use it happily a lot of time.

Built in scsi driver will recognize without problems the first 4GB so play safe and create the OS partitions in the first 4GB. If you use a big disk make for example 4 900MB FFS partitions then create your "WORK" partition starting from the 5th GB. That way you can be 100% sure you won't overwrite the contents because if the updated scsi driver that allows accessing more than 4GB is not loaded you won't see work so no problems. You could run into problems if your partition is between the first 4GB and the next GBs.

on A4000T on board scsi works great. It's reliable but if you are unsure about you scsi configuration skills you'd better go for an IDE*drive or simply get a proper cable with proper termination.

It doesn't matter much if you use 3.1, 3.5 or 3.9 but you should have up to date scsi.device&FileSystem.resource, FastFileSystem... you can load the modules you require with Blizzkick.

If you want the easiest: <4GB IDE*CF drive with 3.1. But only if you are really paranoid.

Avoid Zorro hard disk controllers. Use accelerator controller or motherboard controller but not crappy ZorroII ones. ZorroIII ones like cbm one or Fastlane... well... get an accelerator and forget about them.

If I were you I would get a scsi-ide (or scsi-sata) adapter and make good use of the built in scsi controller.

Keep in mind that 3.9 updated scsi.devices are buggy and limited to 128GB, if you want to use more you'll have to update it. It also affects real scsi controller on A4000T so if you want to avoid problems use a 120GB*drive. These are getting old too but 4GB*ones are worse :-)

[Crumb]

By degrade, do you mean slower, or r/w errors?

I mean r/w errors but I doubt you'll ever run into that problems.

This is a very scary subject.  Can I use my Deneb card to boot with the updates already in place from the start?

Do not use Deneb dma driver with A4000T! You must use PIO driver with A4000T in order to avoid problems (I think that even if you don't use scsi units you may run into problems too if you use deneb dma driver due to the way A4000T is designed).

I'm confident with SCSI and willing to buy new cables and active terminators just to be sure.

scsi works pretty well on classics, you won't regret it.

I'm just about to buy one of the GVP 4060-DT's from Software Hut assuming they still have them (I think I may have had some CPU card issues)

IIRC latests GVP versions like that one are very reliable and memory access is faster than cyberstorm mk3/ppc too.

Is that controller reliable?

I think you won't have any problem using FFS. IIRC there were some problems using other filesystems but only if you tried to boot the OS from them.

I'm pretty paranoid at this point, like I said, I'm not using a full 4GB with 3.9 on SCSI, IDE and USB right now and they are all disastrously bad.

Is the RAM of your accelerators/motherboards OK? is your cabling ok?*are the drives ok?

What scsi.device do you suggest using for the onboard 4000T?  I assumed 3.9 was the good stuff and that tweaking all the devices and libs would be a bad idea.  Sometimes you can tweak them into instability, you know?

3.9 is just a collection of patches (and some of them are not very reliable). The most interesting parts are newer workbench.library, icon.library, updated scsi.device and newer FFS. If you own a Deneb you can extract the 3.9 modules and update the ones you need like scsi.device (there's a nice patch on Aminet done by Chris Hodges, the author of Poseidon), once you have updated the files put them into Deneb's flashrom.

Do you know what I should use for the GVP 4060?

An ide hd connected trough an IDE-SCSI adapter and ROM3.1 with the few interesting 3.9 parts (workbench.library, icon.library, filesystem.resource, scsi.device -and a4000T scsi device if you use A4000T-, ffs and perhaps updated shell). Skip 3.9 Reaction preferences when it's possible too.

Dump AmiDock and use an updated ToolsDaemon, it's faster, more comfortable and overall better.

[Crumb]

Using a PSU that gives a lot of power at exactly +5v is a good idea too. Use a multimeter to check it out.