Optimal hardrive speed in my A1200 / 030 RBM busboard

[SimonV]

I am currently building a RBM Towerhawk with the RBM busboard and I can choose between these 3 HDcontrollers:

An Oktagon SCSI controller on the Zorro board
SCSI kit on the BLizzard MKIV 1230
Original IDEcontroller on the A1200 motherboard.

I tested 2 HD drives and their speed with SYSinfo, both drives have FFS as filesystem.

The speeds measured:

Oktagon.device with IBM UW-Scsi HD : +/- 2,1MB/s
scsi.device (OS3.9) with Maxtor 60GB IDE : 2.7MB/s
1230scsi.device : 3.2Mb/s with the before mentioned IBM UW-scsi drive

Can this be right ? Or should I use another app to test the speed ? I also found it strange the internal IDE was faster compared to the oktagon and so little difference with the 1230scsi.

[zipper]

Was 1230scsi.device set on synchron? Asynchron mode is clearly slower.

[SimonV]

That's new to me ... how do I change / check that ?

[Zac67]

The 53CF94 can do Fast SCSI w/ DMA. RAM speed shouldn't be a problem, so 10 MB/s should be realistic, depending on the harddisk. Accelerator SCSI is always the fastest option.

From the manual:

The two checkboxes "Synchron" and "Reselection" allow you to specify that a
hard  disk  or  another  SCSI  device  is to be automatically switched into
Synchronous  or  Reselection mode at system start-up.  You can change these
settings  and  store  the  changes  in  the  main window without losing the
existing  data.   For  the meanings and advantages and disadvantages of the
operation modes, please read the description of UnitControl.

[zipper]

Check the software you used to setup the drive - there should be an option to enable the synchron mode. As the max is 10 MB/s you should easily get 7...upto 9 MB/s. My Blizzard 2060 did about 8 MB/s.

[Robert17]

I Had to use a program called "MyUnitControl" From Aminet to set my SCSI Devices to run in Synchronous mode with a Blizzard 2060 - The speed doubled with that set though I have to disable it if I Plug an external CD Drive in. It has instructions on how to put it into your startup-sequence.

Phase5 Had a utility called unitcontrol on their setup disks, but I wasn't able to find any information about getting it to run or set at boot time, I could only use it by running it manually after boot and it would only change the settings for one use.

[zipper]

You could run unitcontrol from startup-sequence/user-startup (I never did, could set the synchron flag via other software or early startup of the accelerator).

[SimonV]

Is this also possible with the Oktagon ? Or am I limited by the busboard there ?

[zipper]

Oktagon gains a little from synchron,too. But stays well under 5 MB/s I think - never used a decent drive with it. 3.5 MB/s is the max for ZorroII.

[SimonV]

Does it matter what filesystem I use ? For the test with Sysinfo ?

[zipper]

Sysinfo reads just raw speed, no file operations afaik.

[Zac67]

The speed doubled with that set though I have to disable it if I Plug an external CD Drive in.

Crappy cabling or termination...

[Robert17]

Zac67 - You mean on the external side or both? Inside has only 1 Drive on a decent flat SCSI Cable, and is terminated both ends :-S

Robert

[Zac67]

... and you do remove termination on the Blizzard and add it to the external drive, don't you? Active terminators?
Fast SCSI can run for 3m in total and if it doesn't there's something wrong.

[Robert17]

Termination is enabled on the external, I thought the blizzard external SCSI port was auto terminating?