FAST ATA 4000

[Amigaz]

Im' thinking of buying the FAST ATA 4000 for my A3000 because I'm tired of the 1.5mb/s I'm getting from the onboard SCSI.
Will my boot HDD/sys HDD boot from the FAST ATA 4000?

[samanosuke]

Yeah but it takes ages to recognise the card and boot. HDD/CD access is much faster using FastATA but the Powerflyer has caused me some hassle too. I removed it from my A4000 last night as I kept getting checksum errors and didn't know whether it was the Powerflyer or the drive which was at fault. I've never used SCSI before but I am awaiting the arrival of an A3000 that I will transplant my A4000 cards to and I want to give using SCSI a try instead. I am sick of my A4000 playing up!

[Thomas]

It is not the FastATA which takes ages, it is the onboard IDE on the motherboard. As long as there is any kind of drive attached to it, it will boot quickly but if there is no drive connected, the Kickstart will wait up to 30 seconds before it boots from another controller.

There is a hardware hack which solves this on Aminet. IIRC it is called IDE-Killer or similar.

The FastATA might speed up things a little. But it is not the raw transfer rate which makes the system fast. You should first consider replacing the file system by PFS3 or SFS before you decide to buy a new controller. Because optimising seek accesses will improve the speed more than increasing the transfer rate.

And of course the FastATA does not use DMA either, so you should have a fast processor (68060 recommended), too.

The best advantage of the FastATA is that its firmware supports 64 bit commands out of the box. So with an adequate file system (SFS, PFS3, FFS V43+) you are able to handle HDDs bigger than 4GB without any patch and no additional reset is needed.

Bye,
Thomas

[Amigaz]

Thomas wrote:

It is not the FastATA which takes ages, it is the onboard IDE on the motherboard. As long as there is any kind of drive attached to it, it will boot quickly but if there is no drive connected, the Kickstart will wait up to 30 seconds before it boots from another controller.

There is a hardware hack which solves this on Aminet. IIRC it is called IDE-Killer or similar.

The FastATA might speed up things a little. But it is not the raw transfer rate which makes the system fast. You should first consider replacing the file system by PFS3 or SFS before you decide to buy a new controller. Because optimising seek accesses will improve the speed more than increasing the transfer rate.

And of course the FastATA does not use DMA either, so you should have a fast processor (68060 recommended), too.

The best advantage of the FastATA is that its firmware supports 64 bit commands out of the box. So with an adequate file system (SFS, PFS3, FFS V43+) you are able to handle HDDs bigger than 4GB without any patch and no additional reset is needed.

Bye,
Thomas

I have PFS3 on all of my machines and 300 buffers for the SYS partion.
There's a '040@40mhz in my A3000

[logicalheart]

I have been pleased with mine in an A4000.  I was using SFS, and always got corruptions, but using FFS from O.S. 3.9 BB2 works with no trouble.  I do get much faster file transfers, but I do have a 68060.  The second controller on the FastATA broke some months after I bought it, but the primary works fine with two drives.  - Lars

[patrik]

@AMIGAZ:

First of all - make sure you have a fairly modern SCSI harddrive in your A3000, good condition SCSI-cables, correctly installed SCSI-termination that is being fed termination power so it actually is working and not just sitting there, and last a working clock-battery.

Then try fiddling with the synchronous settings for the SCSI-controller using either SetBatt , SCSI-Prefs or SCSIPrefsMUI.

On this page, under the "Specific Troublesome Devices" section, there are some good tips regarding the A3000 SCSI-hardware.

The A3000 scsi-controller should be able to manage atleast 5MB/Sec in synchronous mode.

As already mentioned by Thomas - a disk-systems transferrate is definately not everything. A DMA capable controller and a harddrive with low seektimes are much more crucial factors to give a responsive system during general use.

Don't stare yourself blind on the transferrates, it is just one aspect of a disk-systems total effectiveness and are thus generally a poor indicator of the overall speed you will experience.


/Patrik

[Amigaz]

Using a FAST ATA 4000 here now on my A4000 and get checksum errors as soon as I switch to PFS3...seems like this controller only likes fFS
Can anyone else confirm this?

[Thomas]

Get a better IDE cable. An 80 wire UDMA 66 cable (one with different colored connectors) should work better.

Bye,
Thomas

[Effy]

AMIGAZ : can you read dvd´s with AllegroCDFS  :-?

[Amigaz]

Thomas wrote:

Get a better IDE cable. An 80 wire UDMA 66 cable (one with different colored connectors) should work better.

Bye,
Thomas

That's what I'm using http://www.mycom.se/produkt/ide_kabel_ultra_dma_66_100_133__60cm_12981.html

It seem to work now, have PFS3 on my 250meg sys partition.
Only problem now is that I can't use two 20gig HD's which I can't install in hdtoolbox without getting errors during the install in either split on non split mode with fast ata prefs.

[Amigaz]

Effy wrote:
AMIGAZ : can you read dvd´s with AllegroCDFS  :-?

Haven't tried yet, have a 24x IDE cd-rom attached at the moment but will get a faster one soon so why not get a dvd-rom maybe?
Does it work for you? :-)

[Thomas]

Effy wrote:
AMIGAZ : can you read dvd´s with AllegroCDFS  :-?

I just tried a data DVD with mpg videos recorded from TV.

First of all there is no difference between CacheCDFS and AllegroCDFS when it comes to reading DVDs. Both can read data DVDs created with Nero Burning ROM (up to 4GB, I don't have any double-layer ones and my DVD ROM won't read them anyway). And both fail to read DVDs created with packet writing Software like InCD.

However, AllegroCDFS appears to be much faster than CacheCDFS. I tried to play the videos with FroggerNG. While with CacheCDFS the movies stubmble in regular intervals, with AllegroCDFS the playback was absolutely fluid.

There is one major bug in AllegroCDFS, though: when you insert an audio CD, it is shown as a volume with raw data tracks on it (which can be played with Play16 or AHI). But whenever a program tries to inquire the disk size (e.g. the Shell command Info or just a file requester), the file system crashes and the computer becomes unusable.

Bye,
Thomas

[Effy]

Amigagaz : I was asking this because I was thinking of buying a Zorro3 Powerflyer at Elbox and use AllegroCDFS to read dvd´s, but when I see that CacheCDFS can also read it, though slower, then maybe there is no need to buy that expensive controller, is there ?!  :-o

[Amigaz]

I think it's worth it if you want fast speeds from your cd-rom instead of the A4000's slow onboard IDE
If you have a CS MKII or MKIII you can use the SCSI on the board instead and connect a SCSI cd-rom and get fast transfers  and DMA.
I'm using the Fast ata now because I couldn't get a Seagate SCSI hd to work with my SCSI on my CS MKIII no mather what I did...guess I will have to start a topic about it or get another SCSI hd...guess I'm an "IDE-guy"  :-)

[Framiga]

@AMIGAZ

try PFS3DS instead . . .don't ask me why but a stupid HD here, refuses to work with the plain PFS version.