IDE - usb through a Spider - a good alternative to powerflyer?

[Boot_WB]

Am probably going to get a spider for my mediator when I get it fixed - does anyone know what the transfer speed is like using an IDE-USB or SCSI-USB converter.  

According to Elbox the speeds are - potentially - remarkable (can't remember exact figures, but seemed better than powerflyer on the face of it).

So, given a standard IDE hd to boot off, and a nice big SCSI hd through the USB why would anyone still want a powerflyer?

Please don't flame my ignorance, I've never yet had USB on Amiga experience.

[ChaosLord]

USB
is sloooow
is crap
wastes massive amounts of cpu power

Above comments apply to 3 Ghz Pentium 4 as well as .05Ghz 68060.

You should never use USB for high speed data transfers; that is exactly what USB is NOT made for.

USB is ok for, say, a digital camera that you connect once per day and transfer some pics over.

The worst possible use for USB that I can think of is to use it as a hard drive interface.

[Boot_WB]

Fair enough, I'll shelve my plans for the spider for now.

[_ThEcRoW]

I have a portable hd of 250 Gb that uses the usb 2.0 port and is very fast.
So i don't understand your statement.

[Boot_WB]

Is that on your amiga, or your XP?

Elbox state compatible with USB 2.0 (480Mbps) and USB 1.1 (12Mbps) devices.
I know 'compatible' doesn't necessarily mean 'runs at this speed,' but surely it's not cripplingly slow like native IDE port.
Furthermore the mediator has DMA transfers between devices, so a usb cdrom - usb hdd should surely be a better, faster option than IDE or SCSI.

If anyone has a spider - hdd setup i'd be most interseted in a diskspeed test.

[AltRN8]

I am pretty sure that what they mean with compatiblity is that you can use USB 2.0 devices in the backwards compatiblity mode basically making it usb 1.1 and henceforth very slow.

[jkirk]

usb 1.1 IS usb2 compatible. you an even say it is usb2.0. the hi speed portion of the usb2 standard is not supported afaik.

[Lemmink]

The spider might be a little bit faster then the Algor/Highway. At best about double the speed, resulting in about 2 MB/s transferrate maximum (the external USB-drive I have gives about 700kb/s on my Algor).

DMA isnt an issue here, as the Mediator can not DMA into FastRAM, but only into the RAM of the PCI GFX-card, from there it as to betransfered the "traditional" way.

Bottomline: USB on (classic) Amiga isn't appropriate for often used drives let alone the systempartiton at all. Besides you can't boot from the spider.

[Boot_WB]

@ all

Lordy, I wish Elbox would state that in their description - something along the lines of "USB 2.0- compatibility at USB 1.1 speeds"

So, this speed limitation will also apply to the possibility of using a USB scanner, digital camera etc.

All of a sudden, USB on amiga 1200 seems less of a good idea.

With the mediator 4000 it seems it has DMA access to the motherboard space (presumably limited to the 16mb on board, not the extended fastram on a turbocard).  Does the mediator 4000 then allow USB2 speeds?

Presumably if the Shark is released (or indeed ever exists) IT will provide dma access between PCI and fastram.  
Can't seem to find anything on the Elbox site which mentions this though....
Pity I won't have the megabucks required to buy one.

[Piru]

Well, I'd recommend you don't trust Elbox marketing talk anymore you trust anyone elses.

It's quite obvious they'll fail to mention the things that make their hw less appealing. They seem to have a habit of recruiting some rabid followers to trash the competition, seem to have no problem in trashing your data, and calling their customers "underprivileged".

http://www.iki.fi/sintonen/elboxdecrypt/
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=6302

[Boot_WB]

I'm stunned.

I'd read mention of the RDB trashing code on the Yahoo poseidon user's group, but didn't know the details.

I don't see how they can claim this doesn't destroy your data.  I have a couple of hard drives where the rdb has become trashed (notably a toshiba which reads as a Uoshiba in HDtoolbox), and firstly - they come up as unsinstalled hdd, secondly - the hdtoolbox program errors out (error 4 I believe).  

It does seem a rather rabid response from an allegedly professional company.

[trgse]

@Piru

You mean exactly what bPlan/DCE did with their G-Rex.
where they appropriately 'forgot' to mention that they had
only one DMA capable and one Bus-master capable slot.

not to mention how you yourself behave when it comes to MOS
(talk about rabid follower)

[Piru]

@trgse

Hello there, mr 'Adding broken Anti-MorphOS-code to GPL applications'.

not to mention how you yourself behave when it comes to MOS
(talk about rabid follower)

How do I behave exactly? Would you be kind enough to describe in detail.

[Cyberus]

:flame:

[Boot_WB]

Hmmm... there doesn't seem to be a smiley for ducking out of the crossfire.   :-D