Hard Decsion To Make For My Genuine A4000T

[amiga1084]

Hello All,

I just bought from Software Hut a new GVP-M 4060 accelerator to replace my aging Warp Engine accelerator which I still think is a great card. I like the fact you can still buy new Amiga hardware so I went out and bought GVP-M 4060 card. People in my local Amiga group I belong to said stay away from this card because it has SCSI problems. Now I am learning the hard way. I've been told the GVP-M accelerator only reads FFS and my hard drive has PFS3 partition's instead. I love PFS but don't I have a choice? I also thought as last effort I could use the built in 4091 scsi controller in my genuine A4000T. As I don't want to format my hard drive to FFS.

I would like to hear your comments on this subject

Thanks in advance,

Merv Stent

[tone007]

The 4000T's built-in SCSI controller is awesome, it outperformed the SCSI on at least one of the accelerators I had in my 4000T (Cyberstorm MKII SCSI.)  Not sure where the GVP's ranks, but I wouldn't worry about losing performance using the on-board SCSI.

[Ral-Clan]

You can always use the GVP SCSI connector for things like external drives and scanners.  Use the A4000's SCSI connector for your main hard-drive.

[T3000]

what ral-clan said.  
Besides, if it aint' broke, don't fix it.

[matthey]

@amiga1084
I believe that the only problem is booting off non-FFS partitions. You could try backing up your boot partition, formatting to FFS and copying the files back to the partition. Make sure you have a copy of the PFS filesystem you use in SYS:L of your boot partition if you want to try. I don't think you would see much difference in performance if you decided to use the 4000T SCSI either. I believe it is theoretically faster as it supports FAST SCSI-II 10 MB/s instead of 5 MB/s max. It's possible that the 4000T SCSI would not be able to DMA into the accellerators much faster memory hurting performance. It shouldn't be too bad of performance though. I would probably buy a GVP accellerator myself if they would fix the boot ROM. I would definately buy one if they changed to 68 pin ULTRA SCSI. The cabling and hook ups are easier, the hard drives are cheaper and easier to find, and the speed is faster. I get a pretty constant 30 MB/s with my CSMK3 and a 15k hard drive I bought new for $10. This is blazing fast on an Amiga with PFS.

[Darrin]

I'd get an Elbox Fast ATA4000 and switch to IDE.

[matthey]

I'd get an Elbox Fast ATA4000 and switch to IDE.

I don't think there would be much advantage to an ATA4000. The 4000T already has a buffered IDE port that is faster than a 4000. What we want is to DMA into the accelerators fast ram. ULTRA SCSI or SATA on the accelerator with a ROM that properly supports RDB file systems would complete an optimal setup.