#Slow HD access with BB
17 messages in this thread
Hi,
I have a 2000HD 80Meg, 6 megs ram and an A2386 BB. I made a partition on the
amiga drive for 15 megs to be used by the BB. So I have a 15 meg file called
DRive C.
I installed Telemate 4.12 on it, and it takes forever to load… over 2 mins.
When on a normal PC it takes a little less than 5 seconds. If I download or
upload, it takes forever reading the drive to start the download or u/l. I'm
wondering if the partition might not be that great? Is it normal to have a big
delay in transfer rates, or should it be good?
Thanks, Trev
Trev,
Yes…both JLINKed and MAKEab drives are notoriously slow. It's
because all the data has to go thru the shared RAM area of the BB.
Don
I guess then it wouldn't make it much faster if the amiga was speeded up eh? OH
well, Guess I'd better get a real IBM drive.
I can have a SCSI drive on the amiga side dedicated for the BB? Without it
being so slow? I hope so.
TRev
Trev,
No…if it's an Amiga side drive, all the data must go thru the shared
RAM to the BB…so it'd be no faster than your current drive.
Of course, if you unplugged it from the Amiga side, and plugged it into
a host adapter on the BB side….it'd work fine.
Don
WEll that's a bummer.
So it's normal for TeleMate 4.12 to take about 3 mins to load? That sucks.
Thanks for your help, Trev
Trev… You can speed up access a little by putting an ADDBUFFERS
command in your startup-sequence, but it won't help with the first
time you load a program. It's well worth getting a separate hard
drive for the PC side. Marion CROSSINGS Newsletter for Amiga/PC/Mac
compatibility
Thanks Marion. I tried the addbuffers and it works great! I didn't
have any at all on the drive before. Someday, I'll have enough money
to get a separate drive, VGA card and monitor, ect.. right now, I
have to do with what I've got.
I only had 15 megs partitioned for my BB. I installed Stacker 3.0 yesterday,
and it sure makes a difference, I've got 27 megs now. Of course, my 8 megs I
had installed before stacker is now 10 megs, but it's better than what is it
was before.
Trev
If you're going to dedicate the drive to you BB, why on earth not put in a SCSI
card for the BB? Read NO SLO! Actually, I put an IDE drive in with my BB, and
everything is great except the BB boots faster than the Amiga, so it misses
Atime and Amouse on every Amiga startup!
WEll, right now I don't have a dedicated drive. Plus a SCSI card
would take up antoher slot. I've got a sound card and modem
installed in the slots. I plan on putting in a VGA card, and will
probably run out of slots if I ever put anything else in there.
BTW, do you know if VGA can be emulated? I suppose it would slow things down
quite a bit.
Trev,
Have you tried removing binddrivers from the startup-sequence, waiting
for the Amiga to fully boot up, then running binddrivers? That way the BB boot
doesn't have to "wait" on the Amiga side finishing its boot sequence. I never
run the BB stuff unless I am actually going to use the bridgeboard. I run
binddrivers and the other Janus stuff from an ARexx script.
Trev: Before you boot up your Bridgeboard, use an addbuffers command to
see if that will speed up your Janus partition. For example, if your Janus
file is on a Amiga partition named IBM: add this to your startup-sequence
before the Binddrivers command:
addbuffers IBM: 500
See if that doesn't speed things up a bit.
// John – (Flying via AutoPilot)
\X/
HI JOhn,
I wonder if I should have a separate partition for the IBM file DRIVEC? Right
now, my DriveC file is just on DH0: with all the other amiga stuff around it. I
suppose it would be better to have a separate partition, because I think that
maybe my DriveC file is not all in one place, and when I optimize the drive, it
doens't move the DriveC file.
I'll give the addbuffer a try. Thanks, Trev
WOW!! Thanks John! I didn't have any addbuffer command for the HD. It took
only 13 seconds to load TeleMate instead of 3 mins. What a difference! Thanks
again. Trev
Your Welcome <g>. Tips like these come from our own misery and experience,
and there are a lot of us online who have been through the misery at
times. I think CBM suggests 30 buffers for every MB of your Janus drive,
so that's why the 500 figure but you can play around with it a bit.
// John – (Flying via AutoPilot)
\X/
Trev,
Using addbuffers will speed up access to the psuedo-drive, but be sure
to add a LOT of buffers. Try AddBuffers 1024. You might also get a DOS disk
caching program, like HyperDisk, which will also speed up things. But, nothing
will do the trick like a dedicated PC drive. Before I got a dedicated PC
drive, I had a disk caching program running on both the Amiga and on the PC.
It helped quite a bit to speed up loading big programs. I managed to get
Norton Desktop for Windows and DOS to load in little more than minute, down
from nearly 7 minutes without the caches!
Thanks Steven. I've added the addbuffers and it worked great! It only takes
15 seconds now to load. I might also try a disk caching program too, but so far
I don't have anything that big installed.
WOW, what a difference, 7 mins to 1. I don't think I could survive 7 minutes
to load Norton for Win. Reminds me of when it took 10 mins to load a game by
cassette on my Atari 800, hehe 🙂
Trev