SCSI to SATA bridge... SSD drive pros/cons?

[darksun9210]

hey all,
just got hold of a Mk3 Cyberstorm that will soon be nestled in the belly of my A3000D after a quick Int2 motherboard mod...
currently got an Acard scsi2ide bridge off the onboard scsi controller with a Compact flash adapter and 4GB card acting as the main drive.

now, with the widescsi controller on the Mk3, would it be best to use one of the 146GB wide scsi drives i've been keeping for the time when i can use them, or in the interest of quiet computing, get an ultawide scsi to sata bridge and use one of the 160GB Intel 320 SSD's i've got laying around?

any issues running an SSD on an amiga, given the lack of clever commands and things that seem to be needed to manage an SSD drive? trim command, wear leveling, delete on inactive, page purges and yadda yadda...

cheers all happy non denominational holidays

[LoadWB]

There are a number of SSDs which TRIM automatically when necessary.  Personally, I'd prefer running SSDs on all my Amigas: more space for less money, more speed, less power consumption, less heat, and MUCH less noise.

BTW, those Intel 320s are pretty nice.  I don't think they auto-TRIM as I use the SSD Toolbox with mine on XP x64 to run a weekly TRIM.  A similar utility might be rather nice for the Amiga.

[darksun9210]

yeah, i head that, less power hungry, no noise, no heat, no vibration... all good stuff.
Heh, i don't think a trim application would ever be written for the amiga. if it was, it would probably take 2 days to execute
i might give it a shot, purely as i have the parts available except the scsi2sata bridge ... so far...
Thinking about it. it's probably as dangerous to run a Compact Flash as it is an SSD. Maybe the amiga's lack of sophistication in this regard is a plus. no journal files, or writeback caches...

[nicholas]

hey all,
just got hold of a Mk3 Cyberstorm that will soon be nestled in the belly of my A3000D after a quick Int2 motherboard mod...
currently got an Acard scsi2ide bridge off the onboard scsi controller with a Compact flash adapter and 4GB card acting as the main drive.

now, with the widescsi controller on the Mk3, would it be best to use one of the 146GB wide scsi drives i've been keeping for the time when i can use them, or in the interest of quiet computing, get an ultawide scsi to sata bridge and use one of the 160GB Intel 320 SSD's i've got laying around?

any issues running an SSD on an amiga, given the lack of clever commands and things that seem to be needed to manage an SSD drive? trim command, wear leveling, delete on inactive, page purges and yadda yadda...

cheers all happy non denominational holidays

What you want is a hybrid Drive like the Seagate Momentus XT as the computer just sees it as a plain old hard disk thus removing the need for TRIM support etc

If you can afford it get the 750 GB model as the previous models weren't as reliable.

They sell for about £70-80 at ebuyer.com and Amazon.

[Duce]

I've had a few of the hybrid drives over the years and wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy.  Real world MTBF is awful and they aren't much quicker in real world usage, imo.

Last Momentus hybrid drive I had lasted a grand total of three and a half weeks.  Switched to dedicated, real SSD's for boot drives and WD reds for storage and haven't looked back.

[nicholas]

I've had a few of the hybrid drives over the years and wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy.  Real world MTBF is awful and they aren't much quicker in real world usage, imo.

Last Momentus hybrid drive I had lasted a grand total of three and a half weeks.  Switched to dedicated, real SSD's for boot drives and WD reds for storage and haven't looked back.

Yeah the first couple of generations were atrocious, but the 750GB model is outstanding (Both performance and reliability wise)

Plus it's the only "SSD" that any 68k Amiga is likely to be able to use without any problems cropping up.

edit: That being said, my A3K runs off an SDHC card attached to a SATA to SCSI adapter with no problems to speak of.

[nicholas]

[youtube]fXMRdvHbVxY[/youtube]

[darksun9210]

hmmm, ok, so we're agreed at least on the SCSI to SATA bridge

just what you do from then on, probably memory card based as the speed and access time will be more than adequate, and no need to give too much mind to trim and garbage collection etc.

[bbond007]

If you can afford it get the 750 GB model as the previous models weren't as reliable.

I have 2 of the unreliable 512GB ones and they both make noise I'm uncomfortable with every now and then, fingered it to be a death tick and I always assumed they were going to die, but they have not so far....

problem is that they are just not that fast...

wish there was a cheaper alternative to using my blizz scsi with SATA than acard. $250? crazy...

[ElPolloDiabl]

I can verify that the benchmarks of the latest seagate drives are very fast.
SSD must have a very low latency compared to anything else.

Also is the such thing as an IDE to USB 2.0 adaptor or PCM card to USB 2.0 adaptor? If not can we have one?

[matt3k]

Congrats again on the snag, I'm jealous just missed out

Like all are saying SSD's are just fine in Amiga's.  The only issue I have found with my warp engine 3040 SCSI, is that it flat out refuses to work with the acard SATA to SCSI bridge.  It works just fine on the 3000 SCSI though.  

The cheapest and easiest way for you to go is to purchase a Legacy IDE SSD from OWC.  You can just put it in and your off.  Plus is the adapter is working, it should work with a different drive.  The OWC's auto trim and are a nice drive.  

Matt
 

hey all,
just got hold of a Mk3 Cyberstorm that will soon be nestled in the belly of my A3000D after a quick Int2 motherboard mod...
currently got an Acard scsi2ide bridge off the onboard scsi controller with a Compact flash adapter and 4GB card acting as the main drive.

now, with the widescsi controller on the Mk3, would it be best to use one of the 146GB wide scsi drives i've been keeping for the time when i can use them, or in the interest of quiet computing, get an ultawide scsi to sata bridge and use one of the 160GB Intel 320 SSD's i've got laying around?

any issues running an SSD on an amiga, given the lack of clever commands and things that seem to be needed to manage an SSD drive? trim command, wear leveling, delete on inactive, page purges and yadda yadda...

cheers all happy non denominational holidays

[darksun9210]

No Worries Matt,
Hope yours comes through. I smiled when I saw where yours could possibly be coming from. hope it all works out.

I've upgraded from a Commodore A3640 card, but with only 1Meg zip ram on the mainboard, it isn't long before it's using the fast ram on the Zorro. and man could you feel it.
The Mk3 has kinda of re-envigorated my "can I use an amiga as my main machine again" idea. however, my wife's had a word about my recent purchase, so a wide scsi to Sata adapter is going to be on hold till we have a review of our finances

the compact flash, adapter, and acard scsi bridge I've got on the onboard scsi is still  seemingly pretty rapid. so i'll stick with that ... for the time being...

Cheers,
Andy

[matthey]

The CSMK3 is awesome for SCSI . Small-mid sized 68pin ultra SCSI hard drives aren't that expensive. I bought a Maxtor Atlas 15k RPM 16GB hard drive (claimed to be new) off E-bay several years ago for $10 and get sustained 30MB/s transfers. It doesn't get hot on the Amiga where it's not thrashed to death like Windows hard drives. I got crashes on boot with SFS but switched to PFS with TD64 and it's been reliable (and fast) since. Don't overlook the simple, cheap and reliable option. An SSD has several advantages for a laptop but it's advantages are not so overwhelming for a desktop/tower.

[matt3k]

We shall see if it works out.  

Track down a Legacy Mecury IDE SSD, when you have a few extra bucks.  

Enjoy the system.

Happy Easter,

Matt

No Worries Matt,
Hope yours comes through. I smiled when I saw where yours could possibly be coming from. hope it all works out.

I've upgraded from a Commodore A3640 card, but with only 1Meg zip ram on the mainboard, it isn't long before it's using the fast ram on the Zorro. and man could you feel it.
The Mk3 has kinda of re-envigorated my "can I use an amiga as my main machine again" idea. however, my wife's had a word about my recent purchase, so a wide scsi to Sata adapter is going to be on hold till we have a review of our finances

the compact flash, adapter, and acard scsi bridge I've got on the onboard scsi is still  seemingly pretty rapid. so i'll stick with that ... for the time being...

Cheers,
Andy

[danbeaver]

Not to rain on the parade, but an UW SCSI HDD can easily saturated the Cyberstorm's bus. So an SSD will be no faster; in fact tests done converting the SCSI to SATA shows an impressive bottleneck.

Now I use a $89 128GB OCZ SSD in my Amy as a small (space is tight in there) backup drive for my 146GB Maxtor 15K U320, but it hangs off a sil3114ide card on my Mediator under OS 4.1