A1200 + Blizzard 1260 + Blizzard SCSI + ACard + CF test setup

[Calgor]

Note that if Reselection is turned off, the speed goes up to 9MB/s. Have to see if I am copying from CD to hard disk if it is better for reselection on or off.

Does anyone know if the period and offset can be saved to the RDB? (the reselection and synchronous settings can using ScsiConfig).

[Toni Wilen]

Hardblocks.h only defines following bits: (and there is nothing about period or offset and I guess any sane manufacturer does not want to use unused bits for something undocumented because it can break too easily, unfortunately RDB does not have any official space for manufacturer specific data)

#define RDBFB_LAST 0 /* no disks exist to be configured after */
#define RDBFF_LAST 0x01L /* this one on this controller */
#define RDBFB_LASTLUN 1 /* no LUNs exist to be configured greater */
#define RDBFF_LASTLUN 0x02L /* than this one at this SCSI Target ID */
#define RDBFB_LASTTID 2 /* no Target IDs exist to be configured */
#define RDBFF_LASTTID 0x04L /* greater than this one on this SCSI bus */
#define RDBFB_NORESELECT 3 /* don't bother trying to perform reselection */
#define RDBFF_NORESELECT 0x08L /* when talking to this drive */
#define RDBFB_DISKID 4 /* rdb_Disk... identification valid */
#define RDBFF_DISKID 0x10L
#define RDBFB_CTRLRID 5 /* rdb_Controller... identification valid */
#define RDBFF_CTRLRID 0x20L
/* added 7/20/89 by commodore: */
#define RDBFB_SYNCH 6 /* drive supports scsi synchronous mode */
#define RDBFF_SYNCH 0x40L /* CAN BE DANGEROUS TO USE IF IT DOESN'T! */

[mfilos]

I can't understand why on my BPPC via ACard 7720U and CF2IDE adapter I get ~4.7mb/s max using an 16GB 133x Transcend CF

I checked you advice Calgor with Sync instead of Auto (Async/Sync) in my BPPC's SCSI setup but I only saw a little drop in speed not increase :S

I dunno what I'm doing wrong.
Toni or Calgor, do u know if I should change something in my BPPC's setup?
I put Sync and all other settings on manual instead of auto but still no increase.
Writebuff should be on? Anything else I'm missing?

[Calgor]

@mfilos

I used scsispeed to check my speed, and my recorded speeds are with a 16777216 byte buffer in Fast RAM. This measures the speed supposedly independent of the filesystem. I suggest you get it off aminet and let us know the results (along with your synchronous and reselection settings). Some devices do not support synchronous and reselection apparently. Also get UnitControl from any of the phase5 scsi disks and report what it says the settings are.

In your case I imagine the filesystem would change the results as I imagine that scsispeed would report higher values.

I also do not know what the Transfer Offset and 4 MHz settings are for in the BlizzardPPC menu. If the Offset serves the same purpose as mine (which is set to 15 instead of default of 8) then increasing that value should speed it up.

Also you should make sure your scsi chain is terminated properly (so it does not fall back to lower speed) and that your CF card really is a proper 133X card as there are many fakes around (my SDHC card I verified can do >20MB/s in a USB2.0 card reader that is capable of approx 30MB/s)

EDIT: Or maybe you have setup everything right, and it is just the Blizzard PPC that is the problem. Look at these shocking benchmarks where the Blizzard PPC 040/25 is 5.5MB/s instead of Blizzard 1260 10MB/s using a FastATAMKIII (incidentally on my FastaATAMKIII I got 8-8.5MB/s - you had one too so should also be able to use that for comparison if slower):

http://www.elbox.com/tests/fastata_mk3_speed.html

You might need to ask another user with Blizzard PPC setup for their speed.

EDIT2: I would also supply termination power from your Acard as otherwise for me the termination did not work properly.

[mfilos]

Calgor mate, with my former FastATA mkIII I had max 3,5MB/s (on sysspeed) while now I have 4,67MB/s. I never managed to get higher on my FastATA that's why I went for the ACard solution (plus the less CPU utilization).
I'll give some tries into changing the Transfer Offset to higher value and report back.
My CF card is a 100% genuine 133x bought from a store local

[Calgor]

If you are measuring using filesystem dependent benchmarks, make sure you have MaxTransfer set to higher than the low IDE value. And SFS or PFS3 will be faster than FFS.

[mfilos]

I've been using SFS for many years now (v1.279 atm) and using the MaxTransfer value is 0x1fe00. Dunno if I should let it higher (what is your MaxTransfer value my friend?) since Toni said in a previous post that it doesn't show such of a difference iirc.

[mfilos]

OMFG!!!

~9,3MB/s after changing to "Sync" with "Reselection Off" and the Transfer offset and Sync values to full!

That's more like it w00h00!

Cheers Calgor mate

[Calgor]

Happy to hear you got it working to a more reasonable speed.

Looks like the period and offset values in unitcontrol are equivalent to the Sync and Transfer Offset values in the blizzard ppc menu respectively. Offset is the number of bytes or whatever it will transfer in sync mode without an Ack. So obviously the higher you set the higher the performance. It is how sync mode is faster than async mode.

I don't know how the blizzard specs say up to 7MB/s asynch as the scsi spec says async only goes up to 5MB/s and also that is what I have observed in my system (just over 4MB/s max). Maybe it is the same way that FastATA quotes 16MB/s.

Note that when adding another scsi device to your chain you might have to be careful about scsi lockups on the scsi chain which might be caused by individual device's scsi settings (not talking about the obvious scsi id conflict but rather synchronous/reselection/high offset/high period). With a single device there are no problems. I am currently trying to diagnose my lockups since I added the scsi cdwriter on the end. At least there are no data errors.

What an awfully nice forums these are, whatever hardware related ideas comes to mind, someone has already made em and often with pictures included

I just checked current price situatiation of the ACard 7720U ... 130eur in vesalia, 180eur in ebay and over 200eur in acard site.

I guess there's still nothing that beats this combination in speed/cpu usage.
I wish there was SSD drive for SCSI but if that would exists, it wouldn't work in Blizzard anyway.

As far as I see, 7720UW version works as well, just need to make custom 25pin - 68pin IDC cable for it.