CompuServe Thread

#bad PP 040 for A3k?

16 messages in this thread
#182637From: Richard BeausangJan 21, 1995 2:26 AM
Not sure what to say. MY PPI 040 has been a pretty solid performer on my 3000 for years. It's been the source of a few glitches. It's very intolerant of most enforcer hits. The 4x speed however does make it more than worth the tradeoffs. I had a lot of problems with the checksum error sort of thing when I upgraded to 3.1. Everything is pretty stable now and the 040 is working better than ever. -Richard
#182727From: Paul IdolJan 21, 1995 11:07 PM
Do you know wha you did to get rid of the checksum errors after your WB upgrade? Paul (aka Mr. Zombie)
#183076From: Richard BeausangJan 25, 1995 2:09 AM
I wish there were an easy answer on that one. 3.1 gets along with the 3000's scsi bus in some ways that are different than 2.x. I always suspect that the 040 may have something to do with weirdnesses in my system but many of the problems I developed after adding 3.1 roms just weren't happening before. The system wanted to boot faster than my hard drive did presenting the insert workbench3.1 disk message. A warm reboot would start everything fine. I had to set the timeout to 2 secs in the battmem bits and the machine would take an aeon to start. I ended up getting a much faster drive and eliminated the problem. I hear getting an updated scsi chip helps smooth things out. I had a couple of programs that started writing to the hard drive as they crashed. upon restart, I would get all kinds of checksum errors reported and nonvalidated device requesters. Spent along time recovering the drive with DiskSalv only to find it happening again after reformatting. I discovered that letting the drive spin a long time usually straightened out. ADPro is a program I use frequently and it was giving me all kinds of problems. Just quiting the program would start writing to the drive and crashing the machine. I was running it from the CLI with some workbench launching program so I started running it from the icon and everything was OK. Must have been some of ADPro's preferrences were set up in a way unacceptable to 3.1. -Richard
#183159From: Paul IdolJan 25, 1995 10:50 PM
Gulp. And here I was thinking about getting an 040 AND 3.1! I will be getting a faster drive, though, since I'll be doing some sound editing on my machine, and I want to put everthing on that drive, to get a speedup everywhere, and maybe even ditch my current drive. Paul (aka Mr. Zombie)
#183286From: Richard BeausangJan 27, 1995 12:02 AM
A faster drive makes a big difference and expands what you can do. I put in a Micropolis 1.7 gig av drive in my 3000 and I can now play large animations from the drive at a reasonable speed. -Richard
#183290From: Gene KushnirJan 27, 1995 12:40 AM
I am using a Quantum Lightening 730 on my A1200 with the SCSI+ from the Expension Systems. Unfortunatly I am only getting 830KB on reads and wrrites. My 1st question is how fast is your Micropolis. My second question is about 2.5 inch IDE's for the 1200 (If you know anything about them) My friend owns a Maxtor 2.5 270 meg HD (A1200) he is getting about 2 Megs on reads/write (SysInfo) How is this possible if the IDE controller on the 1200 is very slow? (Expension System's tech told me that 1 meg is the max that the 1200 controller can put through)
#183330From: LEPIDO R VARGASJan 27, 1995 11:18 AM
IF you get fastram, your drive speed increases dramatically.his drive oribably uses a reasonable amount of hard disk cache and fast memory buffers.I can't imagine what a fast harddrive is like because my 1200's 60 mb seagate hd is reporting 337 kb per second using sysinfo 3.23 ,which is about as fast as my floppy.
#183353From: Gene KushnirJan 27, 1995 3:16 PM
I do have fast ram and an 030 processor. Considering your HD I should not probably even complain about mine. Thanks for your reply.
#183401From: Jim MaddoxJan 28, 1995 1:27 AM
>> I can't imagine what a fast harddrive is like because my 1200's 60 mb >> seagate hd is reporting 337 kb per second using sysinfo 3.23 ,which is >> about as fast as my floppy. Be thankful. My 1200's HD gets 195K/sec. >:( – Jim, on AP (on my 4000 with a faster HD)!
#183472From: LEPIDO R VARGASJan 28, 1995 5:52 PM
why on earth are they so slow? one thing i do know that the dataflyer scsi + is about 1 mb per second,and if i added fast ram buffers to my hd ,it will be about 1mb per second also,which i can't do yet because i have no fast ram or accelerator yet.
#183498From: daniel stripesJan 28, 1995 8:38 PM
Hmm. I don't have experience with 1200 but 195k/sec is extremely slowww! I had a faster transfer rate with my A2090 controller and an old 20M Seagate MFM. I think you should backup all the data on your HD and then experiment with different MaxTransfer values to see if it will improve your data transfer rate. You should also ensure that the parameters used to prep and format the drive (cylinders, heads, sectors per track, etc.) are correct, although if it's SCSI that shouldn't be so critical as long as the drive's capacity isn't exceeded. //daniel on \X/ AutoPilot 1.75
#183398From: Richard BeausangJan 28, 1995 12:51 AM
I think that tech is wrong. I bought a used 1200 with a 125 meg 2.5 " IDE drive in it. Never measured the speed but it seems plenty fast to me. The Micropolis in my 3000 does around 3 megs a second according to SysInfo. I remember seeing something about an adjustment to the MaxTransfer setting in HDToolbox could help the speed of 1200's hard drive. Not sure about your SCSI controller and drive, it seems it should faster than that. This setting may have some affect on your drive also. -Richard
#183609From: Gene KushnirJan 29, 1995 10:40 PM
Ok, thanks for the advice about the max transfer. I will play around with that.
#183477From: Ronald B. RomineJan 28, 1995 6:12 PM
I too, am using a SCSI+. I'm using an A1200 with a 127-meg, 2.5-inch, Seagate ST9145a drive. Without the SCSI+, I get a speed 199Kps using SYSINFO on the SPEED test, but if use SYSINFO's read SCSI option on a partition before reading the SPEED, I get 899Kps instead. Using the SCSI+, SYSINFO gives a reading of 790Kps. A major difference appears in the amount of CPU available for other tasks when accessing the hard drive. Without the SCSI+, I have 80% of the CPU free, but access the HD with the SCSI+ active the CPU changes to 0% free. Other have reported that their A1200's (with othe model HD's) have a 800Kps rate. Apparently, some IDE drives are more standard than others. Since the A1200 IDE interface & the SCSI+ are CPU driven, a faster CPU could affect the speed, and free up more CPU time for other tasks. – Ron. (People who say cats always land on their feet… just don't know how to throw them right.)
#183612From: Gene KushnirJan 29, 1995 10:44 PM
"I too, am using a SCSI+. Ron, thanks for your reply. I used DiskSpeed 4.2 and I got similar results, )% CPU free. I have an 030 in my 1200 with 4 megs fast ram by the way.
#183310From: Paul IdolJan 27, 1995 3:55 AM
True, most of the 3.1/040/SCSI problems I've heard of have to do with spinup and page mode, both of which I'll have taken care of. Btw, what's a reasonable speed? <g> Paul (aka Mr. Zombie)