Help! Constant HD read/write errors

[Heiroglyph]

This will be a long one, but I hope it's enough info to get this sorted.

Since I've been back in Amigaland old bad memories are coming back to me such as how often I have had disk read-write errors on Amigas.

Are you guys having this constantly?  The errors are there on one boot, but not the next, usually while copying files around but sometimes while booting up.

Sometimes it happens on the USB thumbdrive, other times on a SCSI drive.

I've tried about 5 different combinations of drives so far, all act the same.  It works for a while, then shows errors that go away again.

The system is an A4000T/060 (Quickpack 060).
I'm using the built in SCSI, but I'd like to get away from old SCSI drives if possible.
I have a 4 IDE adapter from Amikit, but I've had no luck booting from the IDE, even the first port so I mainly use it for CDRom.
I have a Deneb and I can boot from that with USB thumbdrives.

I have many newer drives available to try.  Newer 10K and 15K SCSI (18-36GB), large PATA, SATA, IDE-SATA adapter, USB-SATA adapter, USB thumbdrives, possibly more.

I'm using a Prometheus PCI if that helps.

I'm not opposed to buying new controllers or whatever is needed to make this work reliably with newer storage devices but if it can work with what I have available, that's even better.

I've tried OS3.9 with BB1/2 and I'm now using ClassicWB P96 with 3.1 disks for the copyrighted files but I'm still having problems, especially when I use more than 2GB of the drive, even using an SFS partition.

Many of the drives I have available are so big that HDToolbox wraps around until it thinks it only has a few MB of space, which makes it even harder to deal with.

I'm having these problems even on small 4GB thumbdrives with a <2GB partition as well as large drives, so I don't think it's all due to size.  I've been careful to attempt to take care of the large drive issues, but could have missed something.

I've got GB's of data that I need to move to safety before the ancient SCSI drives die.

Can anyone help me figure out the problem once and for all?

Thanks

[Heiroglyph]

I bet you are on to something, I thought that only applied to IDE.  Boy was I wrong!

I don't have my Amiga with SFS at work, so I did some searching.

I found this page that seems pretty good:
http://www.amiga-magazin.de/magazin/a09-02/idescsi/index.html#OptimaleWerte

Does anyone have suggested settings for the A4000T SCSI controller?
How about for the Deneb?  I assume now that this is also a concern.

Thanks

[Heiroglyph]

I was trying SFS to see if that helped my problem, most of them are FFS International, no DC.

[Heiroglyph]

I got the SFS guide as suggested and I see this:

When a device has been properly written it should be able to cope with
any amount of data being transfered.  These devices can have a
MaxTransfer value of 0x7FFFFFFF.  Only badly written or very old
devices need to set a smaller value in MaxTransfer -- in other words,
the MaxTransfer value is a compatibility kludge to fix broken devices.

In any case, if you have a SCSI drive, then a MaxTransfer value of
0x7FFFFFFF should be just fine.

Is the A4000T onboard SCSI known to have a bad driver?

Similarly:

Devices which can access data located anywhere in memory (a SCSI
controller which is embedded on an accelerator card, or a Zorro-III
IDE or SCSI controller) should have a mask of 0xFFFFFFFF.

Given that the SCSI controller and Deneb are 32bit devices, does this still sound like the problem?

Thanks

[Heiroglyph]

I do run the Deneb in Z3 DMA.  Man I hate to give that up

I know I've had problems even between two SCSI drives, but the Deneb was always there.

I always have the Deneb running for my mouse and keyboard, but I'll try it without DMA.

Thanks

[Heiroglyph]

Even in PIO mode I can't copy large files to the flash drive.

Does anyone know the correct settings for max transfer and mask with a thumbdrive on the Deneb?

There is an auto setting in trident, but it fails because there aren't enough varied files on the drive.  Of course not, they keep failing.

It seems like SCSI to SCSI (different partitions) on the same drive is working but SCSI to USB is failing with write errors on what seem to be larger files.

After it fails I can't copy anything to it without an error and even after reformatting I get the write errors on different block numbers.

[Heiroglyph]

No dice.  I'm buying a few different USB thumbdrives to test, maybe it's the drives.

I'm formatting my USB drives with FFS, not FAT.

I was hoping for small, cheap, quiet system drives for backup/occasional use but so far it's just not reliable.