SCSI madness

[paul1981]

Hello all,

I tried out the RSCP benchmark tool on my system and got these results using the default test settings:

Transfer rate : 7876 K/sec
Dhry/sec Idle : 62658

I'm running an Apollo1260/66/32MB with FastATA Mk-III in PIO5 on a IBM-DKLA-23240 (an old 3.25GB 2.5")
I know I'd get better results with a more modern drive...because it's such an old noisy drive - need to change it!

The other results from the test didn't work for me unfortunately (busy/idle and Dhry/sec busy) - I got empty readings of ZERO.  I suppose the speed of the system confused it somewhat, it is after all a 20 year old program.

I've used this setup though with Audio Evolution 3 with 12 stereo tracks and 5 mono tracks (mostly playing back together, 17 in all, all tracks 16bit 44KHz - just checked my last project) and this is also being mixed via AHI in 16bit through to the clockport Prelude.  If the FastATA was such a CPU eater then I doubt I'd be able to do the above, so I'm pretty sure the FastATA can't be too CPU hungry.  Oh, I have to thank SFS too...poor old FFS was pretty much useless for this task.  Thank you ELBOX, thank you Smart Filesystem.

[paul1981]

The "0" only indicates there is no free CPU during the transfer - as expected with the FastATA, since the CPU must shovel all the data around itself.

I seriously doubt that the ZERO is a valid result though, because if that was the case, if it was truly ZERO, then the whole system would freeze whilst it was performing the test. ie mouse pointer would freeze, Workbench would freeze...I wouldn't be able to open windows or do anything whilst running the test.  If it was ZERO then even navigating my drawers on Workbench whilst playing an aiff song would show a slow down in Workbench everytime it had to buffer....and I've never noticed any such slowdown.

Then again, I might be totally wrong...even so, the FastATA enabled me to use Audio Evolution to it's full on the 68k, as did SFS.

I'd like to see more results from a variety of systems, and some results with 030 and 040 CPU's.

BTW, I used to copy scsi hard drives one to the other using squirrelscsi and it wasn't all that bad....it was quite good!  I do like SCSI! :laughing:

I would have liked to have used the blizzard1260 and it's scsi but I found the blizzard runs too hot to be in a standard desktop case due to it's underside mounted CPU, and I don't have the room to setup a towered amiga.  Also the Prelude connects to the little backplate where the scsikit connection would be.

[paul1981]

The Surf Squirrel doesn't count, AFAIK there is no DMA path from the PCMCIA port to accelerator fastram. So it's PIO only and equally CPU-intensive.

Yes, that's true - but still a great little piece of kit.  Used my 1200 with a scsi cd-rom drive via the squirrel and back in those days it was the best option unless you had a blizzard scsi.  I never had the Surf Squirrel - mine was the standard (without the serial port).

A piece of hardware I really would like to see again is the clockport expander for the 1200/600.  I hope that Jens is reading this... LOL. :lol: