840445m@aucs.uucp (Alan McKay) (12/10/89)
I am looking into the Starboard II memory expansion for my 500 and am wondering how good/reliable it is. How well does it fit the side of the machine? How good is the SCSI module for it? I heard that the SCSI was **EXTREMELY** slow and buggy ... is this true?? An comments? -- + Alan W. McKay + VOICE: (902) 542-1565 + + Acadia University + "Courage my friend, it is not yet too late + + WOLFVILLE, N.S. + to make the world a better place." + + 840445m@AcadiaU.CA + - Tommy Douglas +
me300234@pa.usl.edu (Stelly John B III) (12/15/89)
The starboard II's SCSI interface is slow, I haven't noticed it to be buggy. I believe (with a 28ms drive no FFS) it diskperfed at about 70K reads 40K writes. This is still much faster than floppy drives, but it is kind of slow for a hard drive. But if you already have the starboard, the interface only cost a little more than $100 bucks, so it's definitely worth that. Hope that helps... John B Stelly.
portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) (12/15/89)
>>>>> On 14 Dec 89 20:22:09 GMT, me300234@pa.usl.edu (Stelly John B III) said:
s> The starboard II's SCSI interface is slow, I haven't noticed it to be buggy.
s> I believe (with a 28ms drive no FFS) it diskperfed at about 70K reads
s> 40K writes. This is still much faster than floppy drives, but it is kind of
s> slow for a hard drive. But if you already have the starboard, the interface
s> only cost a little more than $100 bucks, so it's definitely worth that.
Shortly after I got my Stardrive SCSI interface, I tested it out with
my Seagate ST-157N (40 ms). Using DiskPerf, I was getting about
190K/sec reads and writes around 120K/sec.
Perhaps you are unaware of playing with the interleave of the format,
and using the supplied "fastmode" program that Microbotics ships with
the interface? They both work wonders.
I keep hearing people whine about how slow the Stardrive SCSI
interface is. I find that it works quite well for me. I've never had
any problems, and it works plenty fast. Certainly it's not DMA, but
it gets the job done.
--M
--
__
\/ Michael Portuesi Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc.
portuesi@SGI.COM Entry Systems Division -- Engineeringstan@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Stan Gibbs) (12/16/89)
I recently hooked up a Quantum 40S to my A1000/StarBoardII system. I bought the drive from MacLand, and had it up and running in one evening. The Microbotics formatting and installation software worked just fine. The drive is formatted FFS and I use the Microbotics FastMode option. DiskPerf results were approximately 240KB/sec reads and 180KB/sec writes, with 32KB buffers. Not bad for a $100 controller! The drive certainly makes a difference. Stan. stan@hpcvcae.cv.hp.com