SCSI madness

[Franko]

I agree,SCSI is one of the best standards on amiga.Very few people realize or mention It uses very little cpu when transferring(on proper scsi controllers) compared to ide. FastATA just sucks the life out of a cpu especially in higher modes.SCSI is the most versitile thing on amiga and scsi on the accelerator is the best way to go. Cyberstorm MKIII/PPC UWscsi absolutely rocks when it comes to speed. SCSI is very simple to use once you learn a little about it.

While I agree with you that SCSI is a far better standard when it come to speed on the Amiga when compared to IDE, you have to remember a couple of things though...

Firstly SCSI HD are obsolete, no one has manufactured SCSI HDs for at least the past 2 years now...

Secondly I reckon most folk will be using a desktop A500/A600 or A1200 in comparison to the amount of folk using Big Box Amigas (A3000/A4000 etc..) and in which case IDE is the easier route to go...

Gotta disagree with you on your comment that "FastATA sucks the life out of a CPU" on an 030 or 060 accelerated A1200 either loading or saving big files for example an 8.2GB DVD ISO there is no real slowdown in system performance that prevent or hinders you in any way from doing something else at the same time...

Not so true for the 4xEIDE Buffered Interface but then it's nowhere near as fast or good as the FastATA boards...

SCSI is fine for big box Amigas but when the remaining stock of SCSI HDs run out then you are going to be limited to second hand/ used HDs in future but the same will soon become true for IDE HDs as by the end of this year all the major manufacturers are phasing IDE HDs out too in favour of SATA...

[Franko]

As is IDE... We live in SATA, USB & SAS world now.


Easier? Possibly. Better? No way. Especially on low power machine SCSI shines. Additionally, SCSI drives are (were) generally of higher quality than most IDE and may be expected to have a longer service life.

I already pointed out that IDE was being phased out too...

all the major manufacturers are phasing IDE HDs out too in favour of SATA...

As for Easier, yup we do agree on that but when it comes to which is better then I have to disagree there, you pay for what you get I've seen some pretty naff SCSI HDs in my time (noisy and prone to wearing out) mostly IBM ones back in the late 80's...

Just noticed your edit...

Yes you can still buy brand new SCSI drives but these are remaining stock nothing new has been manufactured for just over 2 years now...

As for going the SATA/USB route that manufacturers have opted for, pretty useless for folk that use the Amiga and the quality of them seems to me to be far worse than either SCSI or IDE...

Since June of last year I've had to put in my second brand new SATA 500GB HD in this iMac and after only 14 months I had to replace the SATA HD in my Hyundi Media Player/Recorder box...

If that's the quality of SATA drives I'll stick where possible with IDE and stock up on IDE drives to last me the rest of my days...

[Franko]

SATA to SCSI adapters are the bees knees for big box miggies.

On my 1200 wedge I use an SDHC to 44pin IDE adapter which is both silent and fast. Cheap too.

While I like the idea behind these solid state devices, you can hardly call them cheap in comparison to an HD when you need at least 500GB of space, cost a pretty penny to put one of those together (if you can even find one that can cope with that amount of SD cards that is)...

[Franko]

A 4GB class 6 card is plenty big enough for the runt of my litter!

Can a CS060 Mk2 take a 2TB drive? My A4000 needs a drive upgrade.

The only file system I know that can cope with 2TB drive is SmartFileSystem which I use on my Towered A1200. I've used a 1TB drive on it with no problems but now use 2 500GB drives as I borrowed it's 1TB drive for my Media Player/Recorder box...

Dunno if the latest release of PFS3 can cope with drives this big but SmartFileSystem has in theory a 64TB limit but I don't know of anyone who's tried this...

[Franko]

Well, scsi hard drives are still manufactured today.

Not according to CPC/Farnel or Seagate themselves, I've spoken to them on a few occasions in the past 2 years and according to them NO-ONE manufactures SCSI HDs anymore and the last production run was around March 2009 and Seagate's last Production run of IDE drives is scheduled for the end of this year in favour of SATA...

Give Seagate's technical dept a call and enquire yourself but I reckon the manufacturer should know best just what is still being produced...

PS: I always run in PIO4 on the Amiga and even on reading/writing 8GB DVD ISO files there is no great slowdown in the performance of the Amigas multi tasking... (I can even got upto PIO5 with the DVD burners but they then become prone to errors when writing...

[Franko]

Interesting. What kind of results to you get with the FastATA running the RSCP benchmark? My TekMagic for example approaches 10MB/s while leaving 98-99% CPU free.

Never heard of RSCP but I'll download it and see what results it gives...

It won't be anywhere near the results of using a SCSI drive (FastATA even on my 060 can only manage about 5.6MB/s) but that's fast enough for me and I't doesn't seem to hold me up from doing other things at the same time...

I'll run some tests with RSCP and let you know the results...

[Franko]

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.

I haven't run the test myself yet but I do agree with you that folk claiming that FastATA is CPU hungry are way of the mark...

Been using FastATA for years now and working on big 4 to 8GB single file sizes and I've never had any bother with it slowing my Amiga down on either an 030 or 060...

SFS is the best Amiga file system for large HDs and large files too in my opinion...