Arrrgh! (FastATA 4000 MK-VI 8.0 and issues with keyboard.)

[slaapliedje]

Yeah, 35MB/s is HUGE in the Classic Amiga realm.  When you figure that probably the largest programs for the Amiga would be CD-ROM based, and even then, the actual programs are probably smaller than 30MB.

As it stands, the lowly speed I'm getting on the CF card right now makes most things seem almost instant.

Ha, even the SSD I just put Windows 7 on has some weird lag bringing up the UI for specific programs.  Almost like the drive is faster than what Windows can handle.

It is sad that the MK1 only has the SCSI module, I'm guessing it only supports up to SCSI-2 drives.

I do have an Adaptec controller that works with the Mediator... unfortunately I can't use it as a boot drive... well and I'm out of PCI slots

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Unfortunately I don't have the SCSI module, otherwise I would have!  I figured the FastATA is a Zorro 3 card, so wouldn't that take advantage?

In the PFS3 documentation, it shows that you should use 0xfffffffc if you are using the internal IDE of an A4000, but if you're using a Zorro 3 bus card, you should use 0xffffffff as the mask in HDTools, so that's what I'm using now.  

That was always the beauty of SCSI, it didn't take CPU load.  Also why SCSI drives were more expensive.  I always sort of referred to IDE drives as 'dumb' drives, since they only have very basic bits of controller on it, where it seemed SCSI certainly had more.  They're all just otherwise platters.  

At the current PIO Mode 3 that I'm running, drivespeed shows 4529485 Bytes/sec.

So it's not terribly bad (much better than the standard IDE controller) but not great.

In theory, it should get up to 15?

[slaapliedje]

I believe that if it seems fast, then it is fast.  I test stuff and report it just so it can be found on the Web, (not to make my phallus size seem larger).  However, a U320 15K rotation speed HDD will get 36 MB/s out of a CSPPC/CS MK 3.  Those numbers don't mean much in real world applications.  I wanted the FastATA 4000 to backup partitions to a CF card faster than the standard A4000T IDE.

Ha, speaking of the phallus thing.. this is totally off-topic, but needs to be shared...

So I bought a house with a friend and his family.  They live upstairs, well he had decided to divorce his wife and leave me with them.  Me being a long-term computer nerd (why else would I be on an Amiga forum?) had offered to help her rebuild a bunch of old computer parts that he left behind so that she could either sell them or give them to her kids.

Well, she instead somehow contacted a friend that she went to high-school with (so over 20 years ago) that came over and was sifting through the stuff.  Well there was a really old SPARC that I'd kind of played with, and my friend didn't really know what to do with.  So I said that I wanted it.  This guy said "why, you can't even run a Minecraft server on it."  I said "Sure you could, you'd just have to put more ram in it and it'd run so slow that it wouldn't really be playable.. but it'd run... besides, I already have a Minecraft server."  "Well I have 4 of them!  And a TF2 and Black Ops server."

At this point I almost laughed in his face.  He also blurted out "I've been doing computers since I was 11!"  I countered that by "I've been doing it since I was 8, and I still have my Atari 800XL to prove it."

But at that point I was thinking "what a waste of time, I'll just take these old IDE drives so I have some spare ones to play around with on the Miggy."  

What a poser.  I bet his first 'puter was a DOS box, which in my mind doesn't count as a real computer  He instantly reminded me of 99% of Windows Administrators that think they know something about computers 'cause they can click Next a bunch of times and think they're awesome because they know a lot of acronyms.  

He really did act like I was treading on his turf.  But I was like 'meh, whatever dude.'  I could have added that I run my own email server, proxy (with and without tor), have an Amiga to hack about, have built many clusters and can design and customize my own phone system.

But at that point, we may as well have just whipped out our junk and hoped that our fat bulges didn't cover them up.  

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Hear are my SysSpeed MB/s results with a 10k Atlas V:

CreateFile 28.71
WriteFile 32.77
ReadFile 29.72
RawRead 27.64

I had an older 15k Atlas (III?) before that was a little quicker but not much (1MB/s?). I choose to look at the average which is about 30MB/s. Maybe you were using another benchmark program or looking at the best result?

Yeah, it certainly seems that a 10k drive would drive the peak of performance.  I wish I could boot the Amiga off of the UW SCSI card I have.. well and that I had an extra PCI slot for it.  Or even if the Cyberstorm MK1 had a UW scsi module.  

Quick question, so would the DMA on the Z3 bus be as fast (potentially) as the CPU style expansions?  I would tend to think not, but not sure.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Well, the bus and interface limit transfer speeds.  An accelerator with an onboard HDD controller bypasses the Zorro bus, just as their ram does.  In theory the CS MK 3 & CSPPC's local PCI bus for the G Rex 4000 and CVPPC does the same.

The Zorro III bus in theory could transfer 150 MB/s, but in reality the Buster chip limited it to about 13.5 MB/s.

That's right!  Thanks for reminding me of that.  It's actually kind of funny when you think about the design of the Amiga and computers in general.  Really with modern day computers, the biggest bottleneck to performance is the Hard drive, SSDs are finally starting to do away with that, though PCIe Flash storage certainly is the fastest way to go (also really pricey!).

Sad that the Zorro 3 bus is crippled by the Buster chip in such a way.  Would be nice if someone could/would develop a replacement.

Then again, most of these type of projects kind of fall into the category of getting a 1973 stingray loaded up with a modern engine, and eventually you may end up replacing the engine with an electrical one... then it just will no longer purr the same.

Then again, the normal Amiga 'purr' is one thing I'd like to get away from!  :laughing:  Even without the full speed, the silence of the CF Card rules... now if only I could get the newer ClassicWB to work with my Mediator...

slaapliedje