CompuServe Messages

Tom, Well, as I understand it it's not that the buss is slowed nor that the transfer rate is slower, but rather that the multi-tasking nature of the OS means that if you do a synched transfer to one device, nothing can happen on any other scsi device until that transfer is done. You get maximum transfer rate to each device, but only one device at a time. That's if I understand the idea of synchronous buss transfers. Given the multi-tasking nature of the AmigaOS, there isn't much to be gained by using synchronous transfers because when one device is in use the others are locked out. I suspect that may be one reason for having boot problems, especially if there's more than one scsi drive on the buss or if the boot drive is partitioned. Anyway, I tried using synched and asynched transfers on one of my non-boot drives and measured transfer rates with Diskspeed 4.1 and didn't find any noticeable difference. Now, part of the reason for that is likely because the drive itself contains a 256K read/write buffer and read/write buffering is on. I also run a separate disk caching program. With all that I think whatever advantages synched transfers might provide are washed away. At least that was my experience with one drive, one time.