Most bullet-proof drive solution?

[Heiroglyph]

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?

Preferably one that avoids as many drive size issues as possible, with any known connection type, I'll buy whatever I need to.

OS3.1 with what patches? 3.5? 3.9?
IDE, SCSI, USB, other?
Built-in controller?  Add on controller?
CF vs. thumb drive vs traditional spinning platters?
Can you constantly write to CF without wearing out the drive?
Do I need to use only tiny 2-4GB drives?
What filesystem?
Partition sizes?

I just want to stop worrying about errors, data loss and lockups, it's killing the fun of using the system.

Thanks!

[Heiroglyph]

I would have thought something like a couple of high speed compact flash cards, one to use and the other as a backup (maybe with a script to periodically sync the two) would be your best bet.

My issue is read/write errors, I've been plagued with them.

I can't get through compiling something without either a lockup or an error, but anything that hits the drives hard like copying files will cause it.

As it stands, I'd likely corrupt my backup by backing up.

So I'm basically picking people's brains on exactly what is reliable in as much detail as possible.

[Heiroglyph]

That is very helpful, you said several things I was unaware of.

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.

I've avoided this, but that puts me into huge (in Amiga terms) drives in most cases.

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.

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

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.

What I've been doing with any drive is not using a full 4GB, period.  I'm wasting practically the entire drive.

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

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.

That's good to hear, although it doesn't play nice with my Deneb if DMA is enabled.

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

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)

Is that controller reliable?

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.

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.

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 :-)

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?

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

Thanks for the details, this is great.

[Heiroglyph]

Are you sure you're setting the right data rates for the device? IIRC if you had them set too high all you got was errors on mechanical drives, I can't imagine it being any different for solid state.

For ultimate reliability mirrored raid would be your best bet. Along with hot backups on external drives, online sources such as box.net and then of course optical media is useful as a backup solution.

-edit-

Also, be careful about what brands of CF cards you get, they're not created equally.

I've been aware of the max transfer and mask and tried to set them correctly.

I've seen several options proposed that were similar, but not quite the same.  So far none of them have cleared up my problems, but I wouldn't rule it out.

It's a situation where I thought I knew what I was doing, it's just not quite working as expected, so I don't really trust anything I think I know at this point.

It's networked to my server, so I could back up to there.  I still need to see if an svn client is available for Amiga too, I just haven't made it far enough to need it yet.

[Heiroglyph]

I use an SDHC Card fitted to an IDE Adapter, which in turn is connected to an IDE to SCSI bridge, which in turn is fitted to my CyberSCSI Mk2.

It works nice and fast, silent and stable too.

You might want to use PFS too.

All those adapters seem pretty scary, but if it works...

I tried an IDE to SATA but I can't get it to recognize on any of my systems.  Probably just not a compatible adapter.

I did give SFS a shot, that didn't work out any better than FFS from what I could tell.  If anything went wrong, I had trouble accessing the drive too.

Is PFS more reliable?  Is it painful to set up?

[Heiroglyph]

Ok, so what do you have now, and what are their symptoms?

Without knowing what's going on with your system atm, anything suggested could only exacerbate the issues you're suffering with, not to mention make it harder to pin down their causes.

On the basics, platters will last longer before developing errors, but are slower and difficult to find in "low" capacities, especially new. Solid state such as SDHC and CF are readily available but tend to give up much more quickly than traditional platters unless you're paying out serious bank. USB.... Just don't go there unless you have to as far as booting goes, it'll slow your system down due to all the interrupts created during transfers and really offers you nothing over what you'd get with either CF or SDHC.

I've tried a multitude, so just combine these options...
A4000T scsi
A4000T ide
A4000D ide
Quickpak 060 desktop version with scsi
Warp Engine 3040 scsi
Deneb USB (DMA and PIO, ZIII and ZII)
Misc. ide drives, 120GB-200GB
Misc. scsi drives, 9GB-72GB
4GB USB thumb drives
USB-sata enclosures with 80-250GB 2.5" and 3.5" drives
Normally a ~1.7GB or less System, no more than 1.7GB Work.

The constant has been OS3.9.  As I said, I thought this was the gold standard, newest to use with fixes for drive capacity.

This was in 5 Amigas (3 4kD, 2 4kT) with 3 CPU and SCSI cards.

Closest yet was the Warp Engine SCSI.  It copied far more files without issue, from one old scsi drive to another new SCSI, but it's seems to have developed RAM and heat issues.

The Warp Engine HD also included an OS3.9 that was NOT installed by me.  I have no idea what was done to it.

I fear screwing up that drive by installing my 060 and other libraries on it so I duplicated it and tried with two other controllers and CPU cards with no better results.

Of them all, the Deneb/thumbdrive combo felt fastest in use, but was no more reliable.

I'll take stable over fast BTW.

[Heiroglyph]

Other than ancient drives, thumb drives or CF's, I don't know where to find a 4GB or less drive period.

Since I'm using less than 4GB of the drives, can this even be the issue?

[Heiroglyph]

What about one of DiscreetFX's 8GB SCSI SSD's that they use for Flyer video drives connected to either the 4000T SCSI or GVP A4060 SCSI?

That would be as fast as possible, especially on the 4060.

I've had zero problems in the past (including drive/file size) with Flyer SCSI drives so I'm tempted to use that for all work and have some small System drive on something bootable.

[Heiroglyph]

I'm hearing a lot of good things about CF in here, maybe I should take it more seriously.

Right now I think I'll try one of mechy's SCSI CF readers on the 4000T's SCSI controller with an updated scsi.device.

How does that sound?

Am I missing a gotcha somewhere?

[Heiroglyph]

Do not use Deneb dma driver with A4000T! You must use PIO driver with A4000T

I understand that one, I hit it some time ago.

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

That's what I have been hearing unfortunately.  It would just be SO awesome to have a new (refurb I think , but still) CPU/RAM/SCSI in the system that I could count on.  No matter what I buy used, I just wouldn't have the same confidence.

Plus it would just be nice to get that warm fuzzy feeling that new hardware gives you

I'm very tempted to boot from FFS and keep my work on SFS or PFS just to get the new CPU card.

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

Hard to say, but I won't say I trust it.

I have removed all RAM from the CPU card, tested, then from the motherboard and retested and the problem persists either way.

I've also used multiple CPU cards, but I don't trust those either.  As I said, the one with seemingly stable transfers had ramlib guru's or failure to boot, even without onboard ram.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

[Heiroglyph]

This is sort of a cross post, but I wanted to update both threads for someone with the same problem in the future.  This was kicking my butt.

I finally got what seems to be a stable system.  I'm pretty sure it was a mixture of bad hardware.  At least motherboard, possibly CPU card and RAM in various combinations.

I swapped parts until I felt that I had a stable A3640 and A4000D, then installed OS3.1.

I ran this and replaced parts until it seemed rock solid. (took three motherboards...)

Then I installed the Warp Engine 3040 in that system.  This still seemed good even with 64MB RAM on board.

At that point, I felt cocky, so I put all the Mediator parts in and although they weren't used, it didn't make it unstable.

Then I replaced the 1.2GB IDE drive with the original 2GB SCSI the system came with and that also seems good.

So far I've copied 2GB of data (roughly the whole drive) back and forth between SCSI and IDE drives with no apparent data loss or lockups!

Woo Hoo!

I've got a good base now, so I should be able to tell when any given part is bad.  Next up, the 060 card!  I hope it is good!

I plan to use better SFS and CF drives instead of FFS and ancient IDE/SCSI once the hardware seems 100%.