Unitcontrol Cyberstormppc

[amiga4001]

The only time I get real speed out of my UWSCSI HD is when I tinker around with the settings in unitcontrol(program of phase5).
That is the values under settings.
When I start the program it goes automatic to 15 Bytes handshake and 40 MB/s.
After quitting the program and start sysspeed I get a reasonable 15 MB/s.
When I reset it is back to old figures around 9 MB/s.
Settings in scsi menu of ppc earlystartupmenu don't matter much.
They are set to synchron and values to max.
Is there a difficult way to save settings to drive in unitcontrol which I missed?
 

[billchase]

There are two ways:

1.  Enter shell entries for unitcontrol in the user-startup.
    Read the documentation for command line switches.

2.  Search aminet for a program that will set those parameter
    flags on the RDB.  I wish I could remember the name, but
    I have used it successfully.

You are right, using the boot menu to changes those parameters
is fairly useless.  I have used both of the above methods with
success.

C Snyder

[amiga4001]

Found a setting in the bootmenu which does influence the datastream.
I had set the bus to 16 bit.
But after changing this to auto the output raised from 7 MB to 13 MB.
But will look into this unitcontrol as I believe there is even more speed in there.

[patrik]

@amiga4001:

I also have this issue, but I solved it by setting the speed of the drive with UnitControl right after SetPatch in the Startup-Sequence like this:

Code: [Select]


UnitControl Device=cybppc.device Unit=0 Period=20 Offset=8 Wide Reselection FWC


This sets unit 0 (my only drive) to:
- 20MHz synchronous (40MB/Sec if combined with Wide)
- Wide (16-bit)
- 8Byte handshakes
- Reselection enabled
- Write cache enabled

Btw, if you have bad cabling and or termination, you will most likely notice it with settings. I also think the absolute maximum cable length when running SE SCSI at 20MHz is 1.5m.


/Patrik

[Framiga]

i don't see a single reason, to use an ancient prog as UnitControl,
when you have the CSPPC early bootmenu available.

Leave the bus on AUTO, Reselection AUTO (you have it in RDB), and
SynchronON.

If you wanna put SYNCHRON ON in RDB, use RDBFlag (Aminet)

[patrik]

@Framiga:

Thanks for the tip, I tried removing the UnitControl stuff from my Startup-Sequence and guess what - the settings were still the same. The same ones that I have set in the bootmenu even.

To make a long story short. Once upon a time when I evidently had some bad cabling/termination the bootmenu settings for synchronous and frequency did never seem to have any effect, thats why I tried using UnitControl once, forcing it to synchronous mode and making the computer unstable when accessing the harddrive .

When I got good cables and termination and felt good to go with synchronous mode, I just threw the UnitControl stuff back into the Startup-Sequence again as I didnt think the bootmenu stuff really worked.

Now it struck me that the reason it never seemed to care for my settings earlier was because the card/firmware probably senses if the cabling/termination is working more or less ok and doesn't activate synchronous mode for you if it is not ok.

Moments like this makes you feel a bit... ahem.. not too smart ;=).


/Patrik

[Roj]

Thanks for the tip, I tried removing the UnitControl stuff from my Startup-Sequence and guess what - the settings were still the same. The same ones that I have set in the bootmenu even.

@patrik
Most likely this is because UnitControl writes the settings to the RDB instead of enabling them on each boot as the CSPPC pre-boot menu does. You don't need to call UnitControl from startup. You probably never did. If your drives were falling back to asynchronous mode, it was happening because your termination wasn't set up correctly.

@Framiga
If the CSPPC pre-boot menu, and UnitControl do EXACTLY the same thing, why do the CSPPC pre-boot sliders allow less than half the range that UnitControl allows, and only half the transfer speed after setting up a drive with UnitControl? Pre-boot goes only to 20MB/s and UnitControl goes to 80MB/s, most recent versions of both. I don't get anywhere near the transfer speed without configuring drives with UnitControl, so ancient or not I'll stick with it.

[Framiga]

Roy this is an old and "already" discussed thing.

UnitControl was written when the CSPPC/MK3 bootmenu was very poor (and not for CSPPC IIRC)

About the synchron 16 bit handshake thing . . . try to run UnitControl and set it to 16 bytes and 80 MBs and then click to SET . . . you will see that 16 is a value NOT accepted by your card. (15/40MBs is the MAX value accepted)

Hence . . . UnitControl is redoundant and totally unusefull (with a recent FlashROM Update)

ah . . and UnitControl DOESN'T write anything in RDB . . .so please Roj . . .

"don't get anywhere near the transfer speed without configuring drives with UnitControl, so ancient or not I'll stick with it."

and you are wrong again ;-)

[Framiga]

@patrik . . . you have no idea how many "weird" things i've done in the past (and sometimes now also)!

Probably, some old firmware or a particular SCSI config/chain requires the use of UnitControl (but i'm not aware of this).

AS you noticed, UnitControl reports exactly what you have set in CSPPC bootmenu.

You can play in realtime with UnitControl to "attempt" to achieve the right settings (often unuseful, due the disk caches and so) and then set the bootmenu, with the same values.