Author Topic: Arrrgh! (FastATA 4000 MK-VI 8.0 and issues with keyboard.) (Read 10944 times)

yurif74 · « **Reply #59 from previous page:** June 18, 2014, 08:36:06 PM »

afrer some testing i had to switch back to PIO 4 because with pio mode 5 even if drivetest report "OK,no errors" i have a lot of checksum errors and locks.. with PIO 4 all appear to be ok. one little difference is that my A4000 mount a fastata mkvi with rom 7.0 (but i do not think that's the problem) have you tried to remove setpatch command? just for try, or another version of setpatch/fastata.driver
i've a lot of sh*it that loads on my amiga 4000: mmu, mui, poseidon, cybervision, modified cyberstorm libraries.. when i've some free time i will try to unload all, and put another hdd with clean workbench install and only fastata driver (ofcourse stock cyberstorm libraries from install floppy) i would try os3.9 too

slaapliedje · « **Reply #60 on:** July 10, 2014, 02:59:03 AM »

Figured it was time for an update.

No matter what I do, how I have anything set up, if I go higher than PIO mode 3, my partitions are corrupted when I to write anything to disk. Then I have to re-copy everything over again via WinUAE.

On the upside, I actually read the PFS3 documentation and found that if you have a Zorro III IDE controller (which the FastATA 4000 MK-VI definitely is) than you should use 0xffffffff as your Mask (I think that's correct, pretty sure it was). This in theory enables DMA, and is really fast, even at PIO 3. I just wish I could get 4 or 5...

slaapliedje

danbeaver · « **Reply #61 on:** July 10, 2014, 03:43:48 AM »

Well, I have the same card (ROM

as you do, and I do have a 300GB HDD I can get a "PIO 5" to work with, BUT the drive speed is less than 10 MB/s. I have not tried an SSD, but it isn't all that important, well at least to me...

slaapliedje · « **Reply #62 on:** July 10, 2014, 07:34:10 PM »

Yeah, an SSD on a max 10MB/s is a waste, unless you're going for quiet (in which case you may as well get CF card, though apparently some of them can be rather problematic).

I'll have to try another hard drive, I got a few old IDE ones I can throw on it, but as stated above, the reasoning behind a CF over Hard drive is the noise, it's nice to be that much quieter, some of those old Deathstars that I have are loud.

I did recently purchase two 480GB SSD drives for my computer, maybe I'll try out the other one in my Amiga...

slaapliedje

danbeaver · « **Reply #63 on:** July 10, 2014, 10:14:34 PM »

Now I didn't say it would make sense, I just thought you might squeak out another byte per second over sadly slow interface. I don't know why UWSCSI was limited to just the Cyberstorm MK 3 & CSPPC. 35 MB/s is nothing to laugh off in the Classic Amiga field, and has to be bit easier to design than an accelerator.

slaapliedje · « **Reply #64 on:** July 10, 2014, 11:49:32 PM »

Yeah, 35MB/s is HUGE in the Classic Amiga realm. When you figure that probably the largest programs for the Amiga would be CD-ROM based, and even then, the actual programs are probably smaller than 30MB.

As it stands, the lowly speed I'm getting on the CF card right now makes most things seem almost instant.

Ha, even the SSD I just put Windows 7 on has some weird lag bringing up the UI for specific programs. Almost like the drive is faster than what Windows can handle.

It is sad that the MK1 only has the SCSI module, I'm guessing it only supports up to SCSI-2 drives.

I do have an Adaptec controller that works with the Mediator... unfortunately I can't use it as a boot drive... well and I'm out of PCI slots

slaapliedje

mechy · « **Reply #65 on:** July 11, 2014, 12:57:46 AM »

SCSI 2 rocks on amiga, the MKI scsi claims to do 7MB/async and 10MB synchronous. It will be much lower over head on the cpu compared to the fastata i would imagine.
A fastlane z3 card on zorro3 would do about the same speed also(more overhead on z3 bus however).

Ide has always been terrible and cpu intensive, its the nature of the beast. POI especially.
I'm surprised you guys didnt just use scsi and a acard scsi bridge to use the cf on these setups? Its very reliable.

slaapliedje · « **Reply #66 on:** July 11, 2014, 01:17:16 AM »

Unfortunately I don't have the SCSI module, otherwise I would have! I figured the FastATA is a Zorro 3 card, so wouldn't that take advantage?

In the PFS3 documentation, it shows that you should use 0xfffffffc if you are using the internal IDE of an A4000, but if you're using a Zorro 3 bus card, you should use 0xffffffff as the mask in HDTools, so that's what I'm using now.

That was always the beauty of SCSI, it didn't take CPU load. Also why SCSI drives were more expensive. I always sort of referred to IDE drives as 'dumb' drives, since they only have very basic bits of controller on it, where it seemed SCSI certainly had more. They're all just otherwise platters.

At the current PIO Mode 3 that I'm running, drivespeed shows 4529485 Bytes/sec.

So it's not terribly bad (much better than the standard IDE controller) but not great.

In theory, it should get up to 15?

matthey · « **Reply #67 on:** July 11, 2014, 01:24:18 AM »

Quote from: danbeaver;768664

Now I didn't say it would make sense, I just thought you might squeak out another byte per second over sadly slow interface. I don't know why UWSCSI was limited to just the Cyberstorm MK 3 & CSPPC. 35 MB/s is nothing to laugh off in the Classic Amiga field, and has to be bit easier to design than an accelerator.

I have a fast 68 pin SCSI drive with my CSMK3 and the best I have seen in multiple benchmarks is a little over 30MB/s which it can sustain. You may be right about peak or theoretical transfer speeds though. These boards also have one of the lowest CPU usage for the SCSI speed of Amiga accelerators. It's almost overkill for the Amiga but it sure is nice for compiling and image editing of 32 bit images.

danbeaver · « **Reply #68 on:** July 11, 2014, 03:05:37 AM »

I believe that if it seems fast, then it is fast. I test stuff and report it just so it can be found on the Web, (not to make my phallus size seem larger). However, a U320 15K rotation speed HDD will get 36 MB/s out of a CSPPC/CS MK 3. Those numbers don't mean much in real world applications. I wanted the FastATA 4000 to backup partitions to a CF card faster than the standard A4000T IDE.

matthey · « **Reply #69 on:** July 11, 2014, 03:42:55 AM »

Quote from: danbeaver;768685

I believe that if it seems fast, then it is fast. I test stuff and report it just so it can be found on the Web, (not to make my phallus size seem larger). However, a U320 15K rotation speed HDD will get 36 MB/s out of a CSPPC/CS MK 3. Those numbers don't mean much in real world applications. I wanted the FastATA 4000 to backup partitions to a CF card faster than the standard A4000T IDE.

Hear are my SysSpeed MB/s results with a 10k Atlas V:

CreateFile 28.71
WriteFile 32.77
ReadFile 29.72
RawRead 27.64

I had an older 15k Atlas (III?) before that was a little quicker but not much (1MB/s?). I choose to look at the average which is about 30MB/s. Maybe you were using another benchmark program or looking at the best result?

slaapliedje · « **Reply #70 on:** July 11, 2014, 05:16:21 AM »

Quote from: danbeaver;768685

I believe that if it seems fast, then it is fast. I test stuff and report it just so it can be found on the Web, (not to make my phallus size seem larger). However, a U320 15K rotation speed HDD will get 36 MB/s out of a CSPPC/CS MK 3. Those numbers don't mean much in real world applications. I wanted the FastATA 4000 to backup partitions to a CF card faster than the standard A4000T IDE.

Ha, speaking of the phallus thing.. this is totally off-topic, but needs to be shared...

So I bought a house with a friend and his family. They live upstairs, well he had decided to divorce his wife and leave me with them. Me being a long-term computer nerd (why else would I be on an Amiga forum?) had offered to help her rebuild a bunch of old computer parts that he left behind so that she could either sell them or give them to her kids.

Well, she instead somehow contacted a friend that she went to high-school with (so over 20 years ago) that came over and was sifting through the stuff. Well there was a really old SPARC that I'd kind of played with, and my friend didn't really know what to do with. So I said that I wanted it. This guy said "why, you can't even run a Minecraft server on it." I said "Sure you could, you'd just have to put more ram in it and it'd run so slow that it wouldn't really be playable.. but it'd run... besides, I already have a Minecraft server." "Well I have 4 of them! And a TF2 and Black Ops server."

At this point I almost laughed in his face. He also blurted out "I've been doing computers since I was 11!" I countered that by "I've been doing it since I was 8, and I still have my Atari 800XL to prove it."

But at that point I was thinking "what a waste of time, I'll just take these old IDE drives so I have some spare ones to play around with on the Miggy."

What a poser. I bet his first 'puter was a DOS box, which in my mind doesn't count as a real computer

He instantly reminded me of 99% of Windows Administrators that think they know something about computers 'cause they can click Next a bunch of times and think they're awesome because they know a lot of acronyms.

He really did act like I was treading on his turf. But I was like 'meh, whatever dude.' I could have added that I run my own email server, proxy (with and without tor), have an Amiga to hack about, have built many clusters and can design and customize my own phone system.

But at that point, we may as well have just whipped out our junk and hoped that our fat bulges didn't cover them up.

slaapliedje

slaapliedje · « **Reply #71 on:** July 11, 2014, 05:19:25 AM »

Quote from: matthey;768689

Hear are my SysSpeed MB/s results with a 10k Atlas V:

CreateFile 28.71
WriteFile 32.77
ReadFile 29.72
RawRead 27.64

I had an older 15k Atlas (III?) before that was a little quicker but not much (1MB/s?). I choose to look at the average which is about 30MB/s. Maybe you were using another benchmark program or looking at the best result?

Yeah, it certainly seems that a 10k drive would drive the peak of performance. I wish I could boot the Amiga off of the UW SCSI card I have.. well and that I had an extra PCI slot for it. Or even if the Cyberstorm MK1 had a UW scsi module.

Quick question, so would the DMA on the Z3 bus be as fast (potentially) as the CPU style expansions? I would tend to think not, but not sure.

slaapliedje

danbeaver · « **Reply #72 on:** July 11, 2014, 06:00:26 AM »

Well, the bus and interface limit transfer speeds. An accelerator with an onboard HDD controller bypasses the Zorro bus, just as their ram does. In theory the CS MK 3 & CSPPC's local PCI bus for the G Rex 4000 and CVPPC does the same.

The Zorro III bus in theory could transfer 150 MB/s, but in reality the Buster chip limited it to about 13.5 MB/s.

slaapliedje · « **Reply #73 on:** July 11, 2014, 09:26:38 AM »

Quote from: danbeaver;768700

Well, the bus and interface limit transfer speeds. An accelerator with an onboard HDD controller bypasses the Zorro bus, just as their ram does. In theory the CS MK 3 & CSPPC's local PCI bus for the G Rex 4000 and CVPPC does the same.

The Zorro III bus in theory could transfer 150 MB/s, but in reality the Buster chip limited it to about 13.5 MB/s.

That's right! Thanks for reminding me of that. It's actually kind of funny when you think about the design of the Amiga and computers in general. Really with modern day computers, the biggest bottleneck to performance is the Hard drive, SSDs are finally starting to do away with that, though PCIe Flash storage certainly is the fastest way to go (also really pricey!).

Sad that the Zorro 3 bus is crippled by the Buster chip in such a way. Would be nice if someone could/would develop a replacement.

Then again, most of these type of projects kind of fall into the category of getting a 1973 stingray loaded up with a modern engine, and eventually you may end up replacing the engine with an electrical one... then it just will no longer purr the same.

Then again, the normal Amiga 'purr' is one thing I'd like to get away from! :laughing: Even without the full speed, the silence of the CF Card rules... now if only I could get the newer ClassicWB to work with my Mediator...

slaapliedje

mechy · « **Reply #74 on:** July 11, 2014, 03:47:27 PM »

Quote from: slaapliedje;768697

Yeah, it certainly seems that a 10k drive would drive the peak of performance. I wish I could boot the Amiga off of the UW SCSI card I have.. well and that I had an extra PCI slot for it. Or even if the Cyberstorm MK1 had a UW scsi module.

Quick question, so would the DMA on the Z3 bus be as fast (potentially) as the CPU style expansions? I would tend to think not, but not sure.

slaapliedje

The UWscsi on the csppc and cs MKIII is absolutely great. Don't dismiss scsi2 on a accelerator(or fastlane z3) though, it will still beat the fastATA without a sweat.
Mediator scsi/sata cards cant do DMA since the mediator doesn't DMA to the amiga.
SCSI on the accelerator is always the best way(well in 99% of the cases). z3 will incur some overhead of course and will use more cpu time.
The next best scsi would be the zorro3 Fastlane Z3. I have a few of these cards and they easily do 8MB/s with the right drives or scsi bridge+cf.
The fastata was always infamous for having trouble running in higher pio modes. PIO IDE is just a bad way to do it imho. UDMA ide would of made more sense for a zorro3 card(if it could also dma to the amiga).