Using Scsi to IDE adapter on 1230-Mk4.

[Fizzy]

Hi,

I recently bought a scsi2 to IDE adapter which I have been using with the scsi card for my blizzard 1230MK4.

I've having a few issues with it unfortunately, mainly with speed.  The onboard IDE is reporting speeds of around 2MB/s, with idefix installed (and an ide express adapter & 8GB compact flash card).

Using a fairly new 80GB ide hard drive on the scsi-ide adapter - and I get about the same speeds?

I understood the blizzard scsi card was meant to be a fair bit faster than the on board ide, even with an expansion board - scsi 1 is potentially 10MB/s?

So - I dug out an old, large 9.1GB ultra wide scsi drive and used that (noisy brute!) and I get 4.5MB/s, which is more like it.  Probably the limits of the processor I'm using (030@50).

I've been using small partitions for speed checks (< 2GB) so there should be no file system quirks etc with sysinfo disk speed check.  

I'm using a "IDSC21-E" converter card.

Has anybody else setup anything similar, or have any ideas why things are so slow using the adapter?  surely a modern ide drive should be far more more than a measly 2MB/s?

Thanks,

Ian.

[MozzerFan]

I have a cyberstorm mkII 060/50 with cyberscsi and an Acard SCSI-IDE adapter.
 
I have to set the cyberscsi to synchronous mode, or else it halves the speed.
I use the utility "unitcontrol" (comes with the p5 scsi tools disk) in startup-sequence to do this.

[Fizzy]

Many thanks for that.  I found my copy of scsi tools, and switched on synchronous mode.  

Sysinfo seems to hang on disk speed check though.  It does the same if I switch the adapter to use P3 (DMA) mode for the ide side instead of normal ATA mode.

Is there a better alternative speed checker to sysinfo?  

[MozzerFan]

There's sysspeed : http://aminet.net/package/util/moni/sspeed26
 
Scsibench: http://aminet.net/package/util/moni/SCSIBench
 
Diskspeed : http://aminet.net/package/disk/moni/DiskSpeed42

[Fizzy]

Ok, think I may be getting somewhere now.  I had a lot of problems using synchronous mode, even with the proper scsi drive.  Speeds would actually drop considerably.  

Then found I have quite an old bios on the scsi card.  Managed to use the softscsi option in blizkick which has improved things.  Had to switch to synchronous AND switch off reselection.

End result - diskspeed max readings (with 256K buffer, fast ram) are :-

Create file - 150813 Bytes/sec
Write to file - 6389760 Bytes/sec
Read from file - 3889667 Bytes/sec

Not quite sure why the reads are a fair bit lower than the writes, but at least I'm getting a decent speed now.

Thanks again!