The strictly Amiga only thread. No socializing!

[Kesa]

In response from certain users whom i will not mention here (bigmac, Duce and LoadWB) complaining about the non Amiga content on Amiga.org i have started this thread that will contain Amiga content only and all social talk is forbidden.

So er, how's everyones harddrive doing?

:p

[Matt_H]

I'll run with this.

So er, how's everyones harddrive doing?

:p

Kinda slow, actually. Anyone got any tips for a Compact Flash drive in a 2000 on a 2091 controller? Could bad termination be slowing things down? We're talking transfer rates in the 90K/s range.

[LoadWB]

Nice trolling.

[LoadWB]

I'll run with this.



Kinda slow, actually. Anyone got any tips for a Compact Flash drive in a 2000 on a 2091 controller? Could bad termination be slowing things down? We're talking transfer rates in the 90K/s range.

You using an accelerator?  2091 only has SCSI, right?  What's your converter?

[Matt_H]

You using an accelerator?  2091 only has SCSI, right?  What's your converter?

Yup, got a A2630 with heaps of RAM. 2091 is SCSI only (also with full complement of RAM), and driving a native SCSI card reader.

[Kesa]

Nice trolling.

Now c'mon, did i actually mention your name? Brackets don't count  :quickdraw:

[LoadWB]

Yup, got a A2630 with heaps of RAM. 2091 is SCSI only (also with full complement of RAM), and driving a native SCSI card reader.

90k/s sounds a little slow to me.  I haven't done any SCSI->IDE(CF) work, so I can't speak on the performance of the converters.  I do know from experience that different cards perform better, even within the same speed class.  Have you used something like SCSI Bench to test raw throughput and CPU load?

[TheBilgeRat]

Wondering this myself.  I wanna go a Mechy Adapter route, but I'm still running stock 68000 in my 2000 with a 2091 with rev4 WD chip and 6.6 roms.  I dunno if my Rev4 chip and barebones is up to the task.

BUT I gotta think anything is better than my 40MB SCSI drive from 1990...

[orcish75]

90KB/sec is very slow. I've got a GVP HC+8 card with a Guru ROM, connected to Mechy's native SCSI CF card reader on my A2000. I'm using a Transcend 16GB 133x CF card. I'm getting ~1.5MB/sec transfer rates on it regardless if I'm in 68000 or 68030 mode.

I had to disable synchronous transfers on the CF reader otherwise it would randomly lock up when copying large amounts of data. Disabling synchronous transfers didn't seem to have an impact on performance though.

The GVP card does SCSI DMA directly into it's onboard ram, I'm not sure if the A2091 does the same.

If you can, get a Guru rom for your A2091, it made a huge difference to my GVP HC+8 in terms of stability and performance. Unfortunately the adapters that the Guru rom plugs into are difficult to come by. The rom image itself is available on Ralph Babel's hompage http://babel.de/amiga.html but it won't work without the adapter.

Sorry I can't help you more..

[Cass]

I`m about to buy the IDE2CF adapters (CF card included) from AmigaKit, one for a barebones A1200 and one for my A4000 (CSPPC/060@50). How do they perform respect to a standard IDE HD?

[orcish75]

On my A1200 the CF is very quick. You are limited to the ~2MB/sec of the IDE port on the A1200 motherboard. What makes it quick is there is no seek time to speak of on a CF card, so it boots up in no time. My workbench is ready before my monitor has warmed up enough to display the image if I do a cold start.

Once in Workbench, it definitely "feels" a lot faster when accessing files and folders, however if you are going to copy a lot of files or large files, it will still take a while due to the 2MB/sec limit of the IDE port.

Just a warning if you do get an accelerator for your A1200, some CF cards don't initialise in time when you cold boot the A1200. It'll give you the insert floppy screen. Usually a Ctrl + A + A will allow it to boot, but it is irritating when it doesn't want to boot first time.

My Transcend 4GB and 8GB 133x cards boot fine on an accelerated A1200 but my Trancend 16GB 133x card won't cold boot, I have to Ctrl + A + A to get it to boot.

Unfortunately I don't have an A4000, so I don't know if it'll show the same symptoms of the A1200, especially as you have such a fast accelerator for it.

[TheBilgeRat]

90KB/sec is very slow. I've got a GVP HC+8 card with a Guru ROM, connected to Mechy's native SCSI CF card reader on my A2000. I'm using a Transcend 16GB 133x CF card. I'm getting ~1.5MB/sec transfer rates on it regardless if I'm in 68000 or 68030 mode.

I had to disable synchronous transfers on the CF reader otherwise it would randomly lock up when copying large amounts of data. Disabling synchronous transfers didn't seem to have an impact on performance though.

The GVP card does SCSI DMA directly into it's onboard ram, I'm not sure if the A2091 does the same.

If you can, get a Guru rom for your A2091, it made a huge difference to my GVP HC+8 in terms of stability and performance. Unfortunately the adapters that the Guru rom plugs into are difficult to come by. The rom image itself is available on Ralph Babel's hompage http://babel.de/amiga.html but it won't work without the adapter.

Sorry I can't help you more..

Hard to get a picture of just the adapter.  I wonder if its just mapping one chipsize to another 1 to 1, or if there is some logic on it...

[orcish75]

Hard to get a picture of just the adapter.  I wonder if its just mapping  one chipsize to another 1 to 1, or if there is some logic on it...    

The adapter has a PAL to do some sort of address decoding as the GVP/A2091 card only has enough address lines for a 16KB ROM (27C128). The Guru ROM is a 32KB chip (27C256). I have tried to copy the PAL but naturally it  has the copy bit enabled so I couldn't copy it.

It is frustrating as the Guru rom is no longer commercially available. I'm always happy to support any hardware vendors such as Jens and Ralph but when they decide to no longer support a device, they should make things like the PAL image available to everyone so that we can at least make the adapters ourselves.

[CritAnime]

Been having issues with my CF HDD. Though a recent format and reinstall on CLassicWB Full and PFS seems to have sorted it.

[TheBilgeRat]

The adapter has a PAL to do some sort of address decoding as the GVP/A2091 card only has enough address lines for a 16KB ROM (27C128). The Guru ROM is a 32KB chip (27C256). I have tried to copy the PAL but naturally it  has the copy bit enabled so I couldn't copy it.

It is frustrating as the Guru rom is no longer commercially available. I'm always happy to support any hardware vendors such as Jens and Ralph but when they decide to no longer support a device, they should make things like the PAL image available to everyone so that we can at least make the adapters ourselves.

I did not realize that the chip was made by Ralph Babel - there's no chance we'll ever get that adapter array information.

I can get 7.0 ROMs for my card - its the rev 8 WB chip that is the hard one to find.