HDToolBox

[kolla]

Yep 1fe00 can help.

… with IDE.

Also try Buffers = 80. I think I was okay at 100. But anything over and that too was problematic.

How? Why?

[kolla]

Not always the case. It depends how good your SCSI setup and what you are using.

What are you talking about here? MaxTransfer or Buffers?
How do you measure the goodness of a SCSI setup? Grades of termination?

Ask Toni Willen/Hyperion Why.

Toni has written about this many times and it's even in the readme and changelogs.... which is why I asked, as you appeared to have some different information.

All I know when using FFS, you are good. Using PFS3 then it can get complicated.

Ah, ok, so you don't really know.

The main difference is that PFS3AIO adjusts its buffers dynamically on its own (up to 600?), while FFS doesn't. The (only?) drawback of buffers is that they eat RAM of course, from what I recall a PFS3AIO buffer is 1024 bytes, while FFS uses 512 bytes. PFS3AIO has mechanisms that try to ensure it doesn't eat up all system RAM, while FFS happily gobble it all away (unless something has changed with v46/v47). If HDToolBox sets Buffers to 30 (default for old hdtoolbox), PFS3AIO will automatically adjust that to 150 already.

Asking Hyperion about anything is a waste of energy.

[kolla]

But if you stick to 512 max transfer with v 19.2 you are good. With BETA 20.0 you can go to 4096.

Block size - you mean block size, not max transfer.

PFS3always used 512 bytes block size, and support for 1k, 2k and 4k is indeed beta feature of v20.

Just make sure that max transfer isn't smaller than block size (so no less than 0x1000 when block size is 4096)

[kolla]

The main difference between HDToolBox in OS 3.9 and HDToolBox in 3.2 is that they are written by entirely different people.

For OS 3.9, Joan Dow did a deep dive and created a new Reaction based HDToolBox and hdwrench.library pretty much from scratch, from what I understand. This HDToolBox supports ASKDEVICE tooltype which lets you pick which device it will use to scan for devices.

For OS 3.1.4 (and 3.2), the sources to Joan Dow's HDToolBox and hdwrench.library was not available and they (Olsen, I presume) went back to the sources of the 3.1 version, partly updating it to similar levels of the OS 3.9 one. But not quite, and certainly not without bugs.

So yes - keeping OS 3.9 HDToolBox and hdwrench.library (and resource.library) can be wise - especially if you have hardware that is slightly different than what's "mainstream".


And avoid HDInstTools.

[kolla]

Yes, thanks!