Amiga.org Review of Poseidon USB

[Targhan]

The lord of the sea with his trusty trident, Poseidon, has given our platform USB. No, not uniodized saltwater and barnacles, but the Universal Serial Bus.

Read the Article!

Review by: Targhan

No really, you have to click HERE to read the article!

--Targhan

[Bodie]

Nice review Targhan, thanks :-) .

[Targhan]

tjaoz:

No speed test because this is not a comparison article between any of the hardware companies.  This is a review of POSEIDON.  Not Pegasos, not Spider, Spider-II, Highway, or Subway, but POSIEDON.

The Spider made a good price reference, and that is all.  Spider + Poseidon = $70.  WalMart Card + Driver ~= $35.  Also, 20% isn't a bad amount to dedicate to how much money is expected for a product.  Thank you for your concern.

[Targhan]

@Bodie & Marktime:

Thank you.

[sTix]

Good work Targhan!

[MarkTime]

Thanks Targhan, thats a very interesting article, and just the type of thing I like to read...keeps me informed of goings on in the amiga world.

BUT

I have to say....

its too expensive, I'll buy it, when it's free. :-D  :-D

[tjaoz]

Hello Targhan,

Why there is no speed tests in this review? Is it because Pegasos has USB 1.1 support only?
Pegasos on-board USB is a 4-port USB 1.1 controller (included in VIA VT 8231).

It is a little strange that about 1/5 of this review is about Spider price. And you have not even mentioned that Spider is the USB 2.0  (not USB 1.1) card, which goes with USB 2.0 (EHCI) and USB 1.1 (OHCI) drivers for Poseidon.

BTW. There are many USB 2.0 cards for PC, which are more expensive that Spider. See e.g. www.usb-2-0.com.
Cheaper are usually USB controllers based on the VIA chipset. NEC chipset is simply much better. And the Spider II card is based on the newest, fastest NEC 720101 USB 2.0 chipset.

[KennyR]

I would only ever use USB for low bandwidth apps like mouse, keyboard, webcam, etc anyway. For higher bandwidth I would stick to IDE, SCSI, or Firewire.

[tjaoz]

Hello Targhan,

This is a review of POSEIDON. Not Pegasos, not Spider, Spider-II, Highway, or Subway, but POSIEDON.

But about 1/5 of this review is about Spider price. Why?

If you write about USB card prices maybe you should compare prices for all the USB controllers for Amiga or for MorphOS.

USB 2.0 controller:
Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon ~= $70

USB 1.1 controllers:
Pegasos on-board USB controller (4 ports) + Driver +  Poseidon ~= $
Algor (3 ports) + Driver +Poseidon ~= $115
Highway (4 ports) + Driver + Poseidon ~= $100
Subway (4 ports) + Driver + Poseidon ~= $85
Thylacine (1 port) + Drivers + Poseidon ~= $75 (or $95, I'm not sure if Poseidon is included)

Spider + Poseidon = $70. WalMart Card + Driver ~= $35.

You have mixed something. Poseidon is the USB stack, not the USB driver.
Mediator and Amithlon drivers for Poseidon goes with the Spider II card.

You should write: Spider II + Drivers + Poseidon stack = $70.

The USB stack is not included in the WalMart card price.
The USB stack, which is necessary for using this card is the part of the Microsoft Windows or the Apple Mac OS system.
You should add the part of Windows or Mac OS price to the Walmart card price if you compare it to Spider II + Drivers + Poseidon.

You should write: WalMart Card + Driver + upgrade to Windows XP* = $135.

BTW. This $35 WalMart card is based on the old NEC USB chipset.

[zacman]

>Why there is no speed tests in this review?

AFAIK Elbox does also not provide speed tests wioth
their card against Highway etc. So quite hard to
make any comparison with the Spider.

[platon42]

Thanks for this very good review. But I rather would say that Poseidon does not support *all* kinds of devices right now. There are always a bunch of evil mass storage devices, there are lots of cheap softmodems, dozends of old digital cameras, various scanners, new webcams, PDAs etc, which are not yet supported (and some never will).

However, I wouldn't say that Poseidon matches the AmigaOS3.x version, because it comes with PPC native binaries The need to download two files will become obsolete with the next version, as there will be a special archive for the Pegasos aswell.

[tjaoz]

@zasman

AFAIK Elbox does also not provide speed tests wioth
their card against Highway etc. So quite hard to
make any comparison with the Spider.

I don't know whether a hardware manufacturer should deal with reviews on their own devices. In my opinion, the speed tests should rather include in the reviews like this prepared by Targhan.

If you are interested in practical tests, I have Samsung 20GB EIDE disk. It is connected to the Spider port through the EIDE-to-USB2.0 converter. Transfer rate for this hard drive is 3.2MB/s in Mediator-Spider configuration.

I checked the same hard disk in a PC with Spider II. Transfer rate in the PC was 5.2MB/s. HDD speed did not depend on the system. It works with the same speed under Windows 2000 and under Poseidon in Amithlon Amiga OS emulation.

The speed is much better than those reached in Algor, Highway or Subway. Check for yourself: http://www.e3b.de/e3b/bench_e.html

[zacman]

>I don't know whether a hardware manufacturer
>should deal with reviews on their own devices

Don't they say in their PR that they have the best
speed? In that case I would expect some
benchmarks too.

>The speed is much better than (...)

Well it would be better if everyone used the same
USB hardware for the benchmarks.

[Targhan]

@tjaoz:

By your own words, Spider is the cheapest of the Amiga solutions.  ( Pegasos I doesn't count, it's a motherboard. )  Now, that being said, your average Joe is going to compare the price of their USB solution for the Amiga against what they find at WalMart, RadioShack, CompUSA.  Nevermind the number of ports, the actual numbers, most of us are going to get what we can afford.  So, the absolute cheapest Amiga USB controller is the spider (if you already have a Mediator).   That is still roughly twice as much as a card found in walmart.  

I appreciate your research into further pricing, because all in all it does help the end user.  At first, I was a bit peeved, but only because I was wanting to show Poseidon.  I did cover a bit of the cost in the article--but only about a paragraph or so.  Just enough, in my opinion, to inform the user that it isn't necissarily cheap.  On the whole, I found USB to be very useful, and worth having.  Still, it will depend on the user's needs.

Another important topic that I did *NOT* touch on is the version of Mediator on which one can use the Spider.  My Mediator is about two years old now, and I know there was several hardware revisions.  

Unfortunately, due to a couple of old HDD's physically going bad, I am not able to use my A1200T at the moment.  When I can replace the HDD, I would love nothing more than to get a Spider working on the thing.  I just want to make it clear:  I have nothing against Elbox.

Anyway, it appears that you just wanted a much more in depth review of USB on the Amiga in general, rather than a simple review of Poseidon.  I apologize if I had given you false hopes ;-)  At any rate, I'm glad it inspired you to research more of the numbers!

[mboehmer_e3b]

Dear Tjaoz,

> If you write about USB card prices maybe you should compare prices for
> all the USB controllers for Amiga or for MorphOS.

I fully agree with you in this point.
But you should do it the right way. Unfortunately, the Amiga does not have
a PCI bus, so you have to add at least a PCI busboard. According to Elbox
official price lists, you can take about 44EUR per PCI slot (total price of
bus board, divided by number of slots; averaged about the 1200 models).
And we will forget about the PCI graphic card you need for "DMA".
So, let's see...

> Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon ~= $70

You know, the exchange rate is 1 EUR = 1.17 US$ at the moment. Elbox prices are
in EUR. So we get:

Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot ~= 112EUR

Oops. I nearly made a mistake. Elbox omits the VAT, which is 16% here in Germany.
So, next iteration should give the correct number:

Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot + 16% VAT ~= 130EUR

The ALGOR price is also in EUR, and includes VAT.
So we have to correct another mistake of yours:

> Algor (3 ports) + Driver +Poseidon ~= $115

Algor (3 ports) + Driver + Poseidon ~= 115EUR

My god. Now the Spider II is 15 EUR more expensive... in your "comparison" it was
45 EUR *cheaper* ?!? What happened ?!?

BTW, I smell a Rat. At least, you leave out information if it doesn't fit into
your conclusion. The ALGOR has half meg of FlashROM which you can use for some
nice little things (e.g. ever tried to cold boot from a Spider II with some
flash card reader ?). So:

Algor (3 ports)     + Driver  + Poseidon +            512kB FlashROM ~= 115EUR
Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot +   0kB FlashROM ~= 130EUR

> You should add the part of Windows or Mac OS price to the Walmart card price
> if you compare it to Spider II + Drivers + Poseidon.

Ah ! Here you take something into account you have to buy extra, as it helps your
conclusion. In your own "comparision" above, you left these things out for the same
reason. Quite interesting.

> BTW. This $35 WalMart card is based on the old NEC USB chipset.

Yes, right. But with a 15MB/s bottleneck a 20% gain in bandwidth won't be noticeable,
unfortunately. This will only account if both USB controller and system CPU share the
same PCI bus.

Hope you don't have a job you have to calculate a lot

Michael