GeForce 040 - sloooow SCSI? :(

[mechy]

Well obviously my memory is lapsing a little then.  It was 4-5MB/s.  This was around 1997, so forgive me.  All I know is the machine was very fast and the HD was much faster than a A2091.

No worries, we are all getting old. I wish i could remember everything i knew

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ha, I briefly looked at that overclocking hack (and recall having recommended it to people in the past) but it seemed more geared to A2091/590 users.  Good thing I didn't spend too much time looking into it!  

Any tips how to use the gvpscsictrl utility to force synchronous mode?  My A2000 is in pieces right now but I'll put it back together later tonight and see if I can find anything, the manual didn't mention how to change it at all.

I'd be happy if the darned thing was just as fast as my A500 with Series II controller and the same card reader.  As it is I just went ahead and purchased a cheap A2000 HC8+ off ebay.  Another expense I didn't need but it will be interesting to benchmark that card against the GeForce if as Babel's site says, that the HC is faster than the accelerators.  :-/

[Robert17]

Let us know how you get on using a Zorro GVP SCSI Card with a GVP CPU Board that also has SCSI Onboard - I tried that combination but couldn't get it to work.

Robert.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Let us know how you get on using a Zorro GVP SCSI Card with a GVP CPU Board that also has SCSI Onboard - I tried that combination but couldn't get it to work.

Ruh-roh!

According to the manual jumpers J4 & J5 should disable the SCSI drive check and Boot ROM on the GeForce.  But assuming they don't... anyone want to buy a GVP SCSI board?  LOL.  :p

[Robert17]

I think I may have read somewhere about removing the SCSI Rom from the CPU Board to disable it completely, but I had given up and accepted my 1.7mb/s by this point. I've also noticed the SCSI Uses a lot of CPU Time, have you had any such affects  on your 040 board? (Mine is 030).

Robert.

[nicholas]

No worries, we are all getting old. I wish i could remember everything i knew

It's terrible isn't it!  I can clearly remember being two years old when my Mum was pregnant with my sister in quite good detail (34 years ago) yet if you ask me what I did one week ago I'll struggle to remember. :/

[nicholas]

Ruh-roh!

According to the manual jumpers J4 & J5 should disable the SCSI drive check and Boot ROM on the GeForce.  But assuming they don't... anyone want to buy a GVP SCSI board?  LOL.  :p

lol

I'm toying with the idea of selling my 128MB Cyberstorm Mk2 060@50+ CyberSCSI module so if I do decide to then that will at least provide you with an option to replace your existing card.

[Crumb]

is your scsi chain correctly terminated?

[Robert17]

Yes it's properly terminated,

Term on controller - Device - Term :-)

Robert.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

So after poking around with gvpscsictrl and HDToolbox for a while, it turns out the only way I was able to format one of my spare CF cards into Synchronous mode was with the much maligned HDInstTools.  Neither of the other applications had an option for it (gvpscsictrl is really just for slow old drives and removable storage, SyQuest drives, etc.).

After formatting and prepping the card SysSpeed reported that it was faster, but SysInfo said it was exactly the same speed.  Really I don't have much faith in either application, or in HDInstTools for that matter, LOL.    What tools are kids these days using to measure their Amiga HD speeds?

[mechy]

So after poking around with gvpscsictrl and HDToolbox for a while, it turns out the only way I was able to format one of my spare CF cards into Synchronous mode was with the much maligned HDInstTools.  Neither of the other applications had an option for it (gvpscsictrl is really just for slow old drives and removable storage, SyQuest drives, etc.).

After formatting and prepping the card SysSpeed reported that it was faster, but SysInfo said it was exactly the same speed.  Really I don't have much faith in either application, or in HDInstTools for that matter, LOL.    What tools are kids these days using to measure their Amiga HD speeds?

Turning on synchronous has nothing to do with format partitioning-it doesn't have any ill effects on a already formatted or installed hd. gvp tools allowed you to turn on any device as synchronous(many controllers make it all or nothing). gvscsictrl was the tool if i recall.
HdinstTools messes with the rdb in a non standard way.

latest ver of the gvpscsictrl is here:  http://www.gvp-m.com/updatejapan.html

beware if you try to use normal rdb standard tools on the hdinsttools prepped drive,i think it may corrupt it.

Btw, are you using sfs or pfs? you will never get good speed on FFS.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I think I may have read somewhere about removing the SCSI Rom from the CPU Board to disable it completely, but I had given up and accepted my 1.7mb/s by this point. I've also noticed the SCSI Uses a lot of CPU Time, have you had any such affects  on your 040 board? (Mine is 030).

It seems like we have fairly similar systems and are experiencing the same problem, which again points to Babel's being accurate that the SCSI on the GVP accelerators just sucks.  I haven't measured CPU speed yet, what tool did you use for reference?  Last time I routinely measured my processor utilization was with TinyMeter, about 10 years ago, LOL.  

[mechy]

Mike,
   i just downloaded the gvpscsictrl from the link above, if you look in the tooltypes of the prog it shows SYNCHRONOUS ON/OFF/TOGGLE in there.
i *thought* it had a menu selections to toggle it on off for each device on the chain,but maybe my mem is failing me. the tooltype suggests it is there tho.

Btw, at the end of the day i suspect the guru rom will be the only help for it,which is hard to find. Ralph will not give out the board design to make new guru roms,he claims that there are still stores selling it,but there are none.. probably software hut listing it still makes him think that.
Gvp had a long history of bad scsi roms and i avoided most their stuff except for the A530(which had the same rom/scsi troubles). the 2091 is no peach tho

It is amazing gvp could cripple scsi on a accelerator capable of 32bit to where their own zorro2 card was slightly faster.

The best thing would be a blizzard 2040/2060  or DKB wildfire,then you can have near 10MB/s...

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Turning on synchronous has nothing to do with format partitioning-it doesn't have any ill effects on a already formatted or installed hd. gvp tools allowed you to turn on any device as synchronous(many controllers make it all or nothing). gvscsictrl was the tool if i recall.
HdinstTools messes with the rdb in a non standard way.

latest ver of the gvpscsictrl is here:  http://www.gvp-m.com/updatejapan.html

beware if you try to use normal rdb standard tools on the hdinsttools prepped drive,i think it may corrupt it.

Btw, are you using sfs or pfs? you will never get good speed on FFS.

When I clicked the toggle in HDInstTools to turn on Synchronous for the drive it stated that it required a reformat.  Then after I finished my speed test and turned it back to "normal" with HDToolbox I had to rewrite the RDB.  Don't worry, I have no plans to use HDinstTools on a regular basis and am only using it on a spare CF, I recall all your warnings!  

I'm using FFS right now.  Not looking for "amazing" speed, just trying to get a grasp on why the performance is so much worse on this GeForce-equipped A2000 than it is on my A500.  This is across-the-board performance degradation, it doesn't matter if I'm using a hard drive or one of your card readers, the GeForce is approx. 20% slower than my A500.  Both have latest 4.15 GVP ROM, etc.

Thanks for the link, I'd been trying the tools off the GVP install disk and Ralph Babel's website, didn't realize there were newer versions.  More testing is in order!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

As a word of caution for anyone who stumbles across this thread in the future, I would recommend avoiding GVP "ExpertPrep" like the plague.  It's probably even more tempermental than HDinstTools, and has hosed many a partition just by opening the application.  After enough screw-ups I've been able to detect it's pattern - as soon as you open the app it resets all of the partitions to "NOMOUNT", and changes your block size to 512.  So as soon as you reboot all of your drives are gone, yay!    Fortunately it can be fixed by booting off a 3.9 recovery disk and opening HDToolbox, and resetting all your parameters - block size to whatever you had it before, and whether the partition is to be automounted or bootable, with no data loss.  Yeah, care to guess how many tries it took me to learn this?  

And now back to installing patches on my system to tweak performance.  Amiga OS, I love you, LOL.  

[Robert17]

Hey mike,

I gauged CPU Usage by using a program called RSCP From Aminet, it measues disk speed and free CPU Use. But before that I noticed the mouse pointer was very slow whilst transferring files or formatting a partition.

Robert.