increasing 'hdd folder' to 'cf card' transfer speeds

[RowanHall]

Hi,

Just a general question.

I have winuae configured as an a1200 with 8mb fast ram, and i'm transferring files from a folder on my pc mounted as an amiga drive to an amiga formatted cf card (for use in my actual 1200)

i am transferring the files using dopus on wb3.1, this operation is very slow and was wondering if there was any way to do this any quicker and speed up the transfer? takes about 45mins to do 100mb.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[fitzsteve]

I've found some CF cards are very slow like you describe and yet others really fly, what brand of CF do you have?

You can speed up WinUAE (put it in Turbo mode) by pressing END & PAUSE/BREAK but if the bottleneck is the CF this won't help.

Steve.

[RowanHall]

hey, cheers for the speedy reply!

the cf is a 4gb transcend 133x ultraspeed card.

The host pc isn't the quickest, its a spare p4 2.4ghz machine. does this have an effect?

i'll give the turbo mode a try.

[thomas]

If the CF card is formatted with FFS, use Addbuffers command to add some 2000 buffers or more.

Also don't use A1200 config but high-end expanded (be sure that JIT is enabled and cycle-exact is disabled) and use 32 MB or more Z3 RAM and no other fast RAM.

Also use an RTG config and not a native display. WinUAE runs faster if it does not need to emulate the native display. Also chip-RAM access and native gfx update slows down programs, even if it's only the small progress bar which needs to be updated.

In WinUAE's Pri. and Extensions page change Run at priority to below normal, this might speed up hdd-folder access, at least on single-core machines.

Disable filters!

Disable sound.

Edit: very important: make sure that the CF card is connected to UAE controller and not to IDE0 or SCSI0. UAE "pseudo-controller" is much faster than real IDE or SCSI hardware emulation.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by RowanHall

the cf is a 4gb transcend 133x ultraspeed card.

I have one of these cards, I'm trying to remember if this is one of those 'slow' ones, I'll transfer some WHDLoad games to it later and see what its like.

As Thomas says best to emulate a faster Amiga and this will certainly improve things, I do all my work from Classic Workbench P96 or CWB OS3.9 which are emulating 040/Jit setup.

Steve.

[RowanHall]

I shall try all this advice shortly and report back.

Every days a school day, as they say!

the drive is currently connected as ide0, if i were to change this in to uae in winuae config, will this corrupt anything currently installed?

Rowan

[fitzsteve]

Just tested mine and 100mb of small files copies in about 40 seconds That wasn't even in Turbo Mode.

I don't have a particually fast PC either, its AMD X2 4400+ (2.2ghz Dual Core)

Just a thought though does your PC or Card reader have USB 2.0 or the correct drivers installed?

Steve.

[RowanHall]

Right, my one definately isn't running at that speed!

Yep, it is usb2 and correct drivers! :/

Progress,

Having changed from ide0 to UAE, the speed has increased dramatically! At least 10x faster!

Having to emulate the ide must have slowed it down?

Presumably this change wont hinder my actual 1200 when card is reinstalled?

Rowan

[mihcael]

Originally Posted by RowanHall

Hi,
...
i am transferring the files using dopus on wb3.1...

What version of dopus are you using? Dopus 5 is much quicker at these types of things.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by RowanHall

Presumably this change wont hinder my actual 1200 when card is reinstalled?

No problem. I only recommend to use IDE0 when preparing the CF card or HDD for the A1200 for the first time because then you recognise all issues like missing >4GB drivers or too high MaxTransfer already in emulation and not only when you put the card back into the Amiga. But once the card is installed correctly, there is no reason not to use UAE.

uaehf.device has all the features built in which scsi.device needs to be patched for, like recognising drives larger than 8GB, TD64 support, NSD support, no MaxTransfer issue (not sure about that, but I hope so). So if you use uaehf.device to initialize a drive for a real Amiga, all mistakes (i.e. missing patches) only appear on the Amiga and not in emulation.

[RowanHall]

Originally Posted by mihcael

What version of dopus are you using? Dopus 5 is much quicker at these types of things.

I'm not sure, I got it of aminet? Will report back

Thanks for that info thomas, exactly what I needed to know!

Was looking at the file copying again today.

When copying some files I found after half an hour or so the progress had halted and there was a checksum error.

The drive wouldn't validate so I used disksalv to correct this.

Having fixed that problem, I got back to copying the files and the drive eventually errored again with the same issue. So back to disksalv repair...

Any idea why this is happening?

It's formatted with ffs, should i need to modify maxtransfer settings?

Rowan

[thomas]

Originally Posted by RowanHall

It's formatted with ffs, should i need to modify maxtransfer settings?

This has nothing to do with FFS. Every file system will corrupt if MaxTransfer is set too high. Set it to 0x1fe00 for all partitions.

[RowanHall]

Originally Posted by thomas

This has nothing to do with FFS. Every file system will corrupt if MaxTransfer is set too high. Set it to 0x1fe00 for all partitions.

Okay, have set these new max transfer settings and trying again.

I also disabled my USB card reader from sleeping in device manager, just in case.

Should I be making any more filesystem tweaks?

Rowan