A4000 IDE Suggestions
 

I've read that the IDE controller in the A4000 is pretty pitiful and primitive from the perspective of speed. I'd like to add a faster controller that can handle more more than two devices.

Does anyone have a suggestion on a pretty cheap solution?

amigakit.com has some ide splitters for 4000 that allow 4 devices... they are pretty cheap....
the best ide for 4000 is the FastATA 4000 , but is costs more...

realistically.... SCSI is the way to go. espcially now as the disks are cheap (well U2W <20GB are LOL )

anyways the IDE is not completely dead

heres a good implementation

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...4eca04267c5ab3

A little pricy but it certainly performs well ! you should get a realistic 12MB per sec (depending on cpu 'n speed) dependent on hard disk.


Now SCSI on the other had is a little different.

you need three things

a SCSI host (adapter)
a device ( hard disk)
a terminator ( either active / passive can also be a device on the chain)

speeds are a little slower in comparrison to the IDE solution above

(arround 8MB+ per sec with a good disk and fast cpu) the cost is arround 60$.

you will need to get a zorro2/3 scsi card (a disk ) and a terminiator should the card / device require it..

have a search on here to see what scsi can offer you.

I have a Zorro II GVP Series 2 controller laying around. Would that be a better solution than IDE?

$133 is pretty expensive for an IDE interface. Any thoughts on the Buddha IDE Interface? Its about $56

Have a fast ata v1.2 (probably higher about) with a 120g hd attached to one and a DVDRW to the other (don't bother with slaves... 60g booting hd on internal ide...

all devices set to master

it all works fine with good speed :)

IDE sucks alot of CPU juice so you get a general system slowdown is you gonna use your A4000 for any serious

Really noticed this yesterday when I went SCSI on my A1200 with Blizzard PPC, I got 2-3 times faster system....

• Cyberstorm MKIII / PPC
  
  Positives: Fastest hard disk controller with a peak rate of 40Mbyte/sec. The best accelerator AND an easy cheap RAM upgrade.
  Negatives: Very expensive.
  
  
• Fastlane SCSI controller
  
  Positives: Relatively cheap. Fastest Zorro SCSI card. Can take 64Mbytes of RAM.
  Negatives: Requires buster rev11 for good operation.
  
  
• A4091
  
  Positives: Relatively cheap, Fast SCSI-II
  Negatives: Requires buster rev11, no Fast RAM options.
  
  
• GVP HC8+
  
  Positives: Cheap. Upto 8Meg FAST RAM upgrade.
  Negatives: Relatively slow DMA.
  
  
• A2091 SCSI controller
  
  Positives: VERY cheap. 2Mbyte Fast RAM upgrade.
  Negatives: Relatively slow, but still DMA (unlike IDE).

I wouldnt even consider looking at any other cards.

IMHO the Buddah IDE is slow and uses CPU. I am not sure it even offers much in the way of speed or features over the internal IDE. HOWEVER it does however usually also include a Catweasel interface so that you can use regular PC floppy drives AND it has clock ports so that you can use things like USB or Sound cards.

the buddha has the same speed as the internal IDE on the 4000 , nad depends from the cpu .....

To add what Alexh said, and offer some ide of attainable transfer rates with a specific drive type, in this case an ultra-160 SCSI-3 disk drive

Warp Engine 040 with FastSCSI-II, approx 7-8mb/sec transfer rate
CyberstormPPC with ultra-wide SCSI, approx 28mb/sec transfer rate

Using an older SCSI drive I got slightly slower transfer rates on the WE, and very slightly faster tx rates on the CSPPC (iirc 6mb/sec WE vs 8mb/sec CSPPC).

Mixing and matching SCSI drive types and controllers is fine, ie if you can only obtain an old FAST-SCSI II controller, then stick a "modern" ultra-wide drive on it to squeeze out the best performance. IE rather than buy an old (1gb, 2gb, 4gb) SCSI-II drive, buy a 9gb UW-SCSI drive, or even a 9gb ultra160 drive. Sure, the drive isn't going to perform as well as it could, but the newer drives tend to have higher data density and lower latency, thus optimising the transfer rates. And given the very low prices, one might as well spend the extra. Even if an old SCSI-II drive is free...

Put another way, when I sold my two A4Ks, I rebuilt the WE040 system first. Then cloned the disk onto an ultra160 drive. The differnce was noticeable on the same system... the ul160 image was then tweaked with CSPPC specific libs etc and stuck in the CSPPC A4K. Hope you are "luvin' " it, Tevor!

on my csppc setup, I use a laptop 2,5" 40gb IDE drive, that spins @5400rpm and is connected to the csppc with an acard7720UW adaptor. I get 28mb/sec , less heat and power consuption plus it takes less space inside the A4000D case (because of the 2,5" HDD ofcourse)
the HD is a Hitachi one, with 8MB cache and "enhanced" perfomance...

You can get 28Mbyte/s from a 5400rpm 2.5" drive through an IDE/SCSI bridge?

An ultra-160 SCSI-3 disk (like the one alewis used) should have a higher bandwidth than your setup.

This points to the interface having a 28Mb/s maximum :(

Theoretical max 40 MB/s, in practice 30 - 32 MB/s max. I got just over 30.
Well, speaking of CSPPC SCSI interface of course.

yeah.... although it is a new 5400rpm and hitachi advertise it's higher perfomance....
Also I measured it with SysSpeed.

The same drive, in a PC, only achieves (iirc) 30-34mb/sec on a u160 controller. Had I thought about it, I would have tried with 36gb and 73gb drives, just to see what the CSPPC would top out at.

That said, Diskperf only measures STR performance - there is no way to ascertain - accurately - max throughput/bandwidth:

1. The CSPPC is a HBA, not a RAID conroller, so one can only test one disk at a time.

2. One can only have one CSPPC in a system, so no way to max out bus-to-bus transfers

3. No software to measure drive-to-drive copies on the same bus, uless one uses a fixed fixed file size, a stpo watch, and averages say a dozen identical runs.

That said, I can't think of a situation, on an A4K, where 28mb/sec is going to be a limitation!