Hard drive speed, few questions

[Glen M]

I've been testing different drive media in an attempt to find the fastest but the results from my 1200 are extremely meh.

Oddly though my CD32 is around 2-3 times faster. Its does have the 54mhz 030 compared to the 40mhz 030 in the 1200 but would that be enough to increase drive speed from 3.5mb/s to 6mb/s?

The file system I'm using is pfs3. Are any of the other faster? BTW Im running 3.1 roms on each machine.

I was told my IDEFIX97 board would improve performance but it does nothing. Do I have to install the ide fix tool for it?

Media tested was CF card, SD card and an Ide drive which was the fastest by quite a margin too. I also tried a Kingston ssd but that wouldn't boot on the real machines.

[fitzsteve]

The drive speed is determined by the hardware and the driver (scsi.device) the file system although can make file transfer more efficient does not effect raw speed.

The IDEFix needs an Express adapter to increase speed, if your IDEfix board has the appropriate header otherwise it's just a buffered IDE board.

A FastATA in the A1200 would give you faster speeds but to be honest you're already well above average, 1.7 to 2.2mb/sec without additional hardware is normally around the average raw transfer speed of the A1200 IDE.

What accelerator do you have in your CD32? I have a TF330 but I don't see anywhere near these speeds.

By the way 6mb/sec is around the limit if some CF cards that's why you see better with the real HD.

[Daedalus]

IDEFix without the Express hardware will still speed things up by a certain amount due to the scsi.device driver patches applied, but it's a modest improvement compared to the additional hardware. If you don't use the IDEFix patch, it will indeed be the same speed as it's still using the standard scsi.device.

The CD32 is most likely faster due to the hardware implementation. It emulates Gayle-style hardware access, but it isn't restricted by the original Galye chip so could well be more efficient.

PFS3 is probably the fastest you can get these days. If you're measuring raw block speed though, the filesystem has less to do with it and you'll get higher values than if you're measuring actual file access.

Another possibility is that there are differences in cache setup between the two systems, but I'm just speculating there.

[Glen M]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

The drive speed is determined by the hardware and the driver (scsi.device) the file system although can make file transfer more efficient does not effect raw speed.

The IDEFix needs an Express adapter to increase speed, if your IDEfix board has the appropriate header otherwise it's just a buffered IDE board.

A FastATA in the A1200 would give you faster speeds but to be honest you're already well above average, 1.7 to 2.2mb/sec without additional hardware is normally around the average raw transfer speed of the A1200 IDE.

What accelerator do you have in your CD32? I have a TF330 but I don't see anywhere near these speeds.

By the way 6mb/sec is around the limit if some CF cards that's why you see better with the real HD.

I've got the TF330 overclocked to 54mhz. One of my cf cards hits about 5.8mb/s but the other is about 3.5. The ide drive got just over 6mb/s but unfortunately there isn't room in the case for it.

I guess it's about as fast as its going to get then without spending money on more hardware.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by Glen M

I've got the TF330 overclocked to 54mhz. One of my cf cards hits about 5.8mb/s but the other is about 3.5. The ide drive got just over 6mb/s but unfortunately there isn't room in the case for it.

I guess it's about as fast as its going to get then without spending money on more hardware.

To be honest the speeds you're getting now are pretty decent, with my FastATA in my A1200T I'm only getting 6.3mb/sec @ PIO4 (300x CF)

I've heard of people getting around 10mb/sec but never anywhere near the theatrical 16mb/sec.

SCSI2 Speeds are also around 10mb/sec on Amiga, only the UW SCSI on the Cyberstorm PPC is faster at around 30mb/sec.

I'll have to see what I'm getting with my TF330

[fitzsteve]

So my TF330 I have a verbatim card, might only be a 30x or 50x card though, gives 2.7mb/sec. PFS3 file system (8gb CF)

[Glen M]

Bit more testing with scsi.device.44.20 this time and my 16gb CF card gets to 4.7mb/s but my fast 8gb card gets to a very impressive.... dramatic pause.... 8mb/s

Question though. When trying scsi.device.44.20 with the IDE drive I get an error on both the CD32 and the 1200 as follows:

TD32 and Direct SCSI access modes failed!
Can't read block 2185343 (<4G)
scsi.device:0

Any ideas why this would only effect the IDE drive? The CF, SD and IDE are all setup exactly the same.

EDIT: got it fixed, something wrong with the partition I had created.