GVP 3001 Users Read This
13 messages in this thread
[ continuation ]
down to his LA home/office and format the drive in front of his eyes before
he would swap me (he wanted to give me a refund minus a 15% restocking
charge).
Bottom line is, if you want to add a second drive, ask GVP first about
what is compatable. If might be preferable to use a Amiga dealer, who
should know what works, but you will most likely pay more. Everything
worked out ok for me, but took me a week and no small amount of
frustration.
A note on GVP customer service. First they have a voice mail system,
which I hae. I called tech support on Monday and Tuesday and left my name
and phone number. I called the manager of tech support on Wednesday (late
in the work day there) and left my name and phone number. I posted a
message on the support BBS on Monday. I did not receive a return call until
Thursday and a responce to my message was not posted till Wednesday
morning, which I downloaded late Wed night. But on Thursday, the phone rang
off the hook. I got no less than for calls from various GVP reps. The
manager of tech support appologized for the delay in responce and said he
was simply short handed and was having a hard time finding good "Amiga
people" to fill his open tech support position. He even asked me if I
wanted to relocate (imagine getting an unsolicited job offer in the
recession). To bad the Navy has me for another 16 months. So, I am going to
give GVP a public benefit of the doubt. I hope they can build up their tech
support staff, and please GVP get rid of voice mail.
<<< Michael Shea >>>>
<<< 76665,3360 >>>>
Michael,
Another solution is to junk the AT drive, get a SCSI interface, and
use SCSI drives instead of the AT drives. You can add more drives to the
chain than the AT will usually allow. Further, SCSI drives are just as
cheap as the AT drives and the newer SCSI controllers for the Amiga are
much faster than the AT interface on the 3001. Just a thought.
Steven,
Well, I never really considered junking my AT drive. I did consider
though buying a SCSI controller and a SCSI drive instead of a second AT,
but I could not really afford to buy the controller and a hard drive. I
know at some point I am going to need a SCSI controller (to add a tape unit
for instance) but when that time comes I can just buy the controller and
add it on, keeping my existing AT drives.
On thing though, are you quite sure that newer SCSI controllers are that
much faster than the AT controller on the 3001. In my experience, my
conbination of a 3001 and a Quantum 80AT is very fast indeed. And I am
still running with the disk based FFS (new AT roms are on the way from GVP
to use the new FFS). One reason I think the GVP controllers are so fast is
that they can load files of the disk directly into the on board 32 bit RAM.
If indeed the new SCSI are "much faster" I must find someone who has one so
I can be impressed…..
<<< Michael Shea >>>>
<<< 76665,3360 >>>>
Michael,
Most AT controllers (especially those on the PC side) are not quite
as fast as the newer SCSIs, not that the drives aren't as fast, but that
the controllers are slower. The fastest SCSIs on the Amiga will produce
transfer rates upwards of 1.3 to 2 Mbytes/sec from a Quantum 80, 120, 240
LPS SCSI drive. I have a Nexus (which is pretty fast, but not the fastest)
controller and a Quantum 240 and 105 LPS drives. The 240 shows 1.5 meg and
the 105 about 1.1 meg transfer rates from DiskSpeed 4.2. Raw device rates
run around 1.8 and 1.4, respectively. You could compare that to your AT
with DiskSpeed to see how the IDE controller does. The latest DiskSpeed
archive has a second program, SCSIspeed, which measures the raw device
transfer rates. The figures I cited were produced by those two programs.
This produced on a GVP 3001 accelerator (28 Mhz) with 4 meg of 32 bit ram
and 4 meg of 16 bit ram on the Nexus card. Perhaps that will give you a
way of ascertaining if there is any benefit to moving up to SCSI. Another
benefit of the SCSI is that you can support up to seven devices, whereas
the IDEs usually support not more than two devices, master and one slave.
Steven,
Thanks for the info. I will try to find diskspeed and see how fast my
configuration works.
I know some day I need to get a SCSI controller, but when I do I am
still not sure I will get rid of my AT's. Just add a SCSI controller with a
CDROM and Tape Backup and……Somebody wake me up…….8^)….
<<< Michael Shea >>>>
<<< 76665,3360 >>>>
Michael,
I also recently needed more HD capacity and ended getting a deal where I
could add a Quantum 210 and a SCSI controller fairly cheaply (as if a 210
is cheap!). Anyway, right after I installed the controller and the drive,
I ran all the usual benchmarks. The best the 40 Meg (AT on the A3001)
could do was 650K on transfers. The 210 does 1.5M and this isn't a SCSI-2
controller, just yea ole SCSI-1.
Anyway, to make it short, I found a new use for the AT drive, it's going
in my mother's new A500. So, they do have a use 🙂
Brian Bartlett
Steven,
I have nearly the same configuration (A3001, Q80, 8meg). I recently
bought a Trumpcard Pro and Quantum 210. I haven't done any speed tests, I
assume the SCSI is faster. My use of the AT drive will be limited to
booting, applications, and support files. I don't care how long these take
to load, what would be the difference… a few milliseconds? I think I can
wait, sip some more coffee.
The SCSI, OTOH, will store VistaPro anims, which play back from disk. As
soon as I finish rendering my 200 frame tour of Grand Canyon, I'll check it
out for speed. The SCSI will also be used for storing 24 bit single anim
frames for transfer to tape and a MAC partition for AMaxII+ (waiting for
ROMs).
Anyways, my point is/was the AT drive is not dead/outdated as there are
many things that need not be speed intensive.
– Steve (is) Whap!(ped)
Stephen,
Agreed…An don't call me Steven….8^)….
<<< Michael Shea >>>>
<<< 76665,3360 >>>>
How does the A2091 (the controller in the A3000 is an A2091, right?) rank
in the access speed department?
-Sam
Sam,
I don't know, I don't have one. I would assume it's pretty fast,
but I don't know how it ranks against the many competitors. In fact, I
doubt that there is a massive difference between the top competitors, but I
haven't seen any recent comparisons. I know how fast my Nexus is, and you
can download DiskSpeed (its freeware) to see how fast yours is.
*Where* can you get SCSI drives "just as cheap" as AT/IDE drives?? As a
distributor I know that SCSI drives are more expensive across the board
than AT/IDE drives.
-Sam
Sam,
I regularly see them in Computer Shopper from various distributors.
Depending upon the company, the SCSI may be slightly more expensive or the
same price.
Well, if they're so short handed, I can see why they'd need a voice mail
system. At least it works better that Supra's — "Your call cannot go
through… [click] bzzzz" Now THAT's impressive….. NOT!
Brian
– via Whap!