lee@sed170.HAC.COM (John Lee) (12/05/89)
About two weeks ago, I posted an article asking for comparisons of
the Kronos and Hardframe controllers for my A2000, and opinions on which was
better. I received two replies, one by E-mail and one on the net. I wish
to thank Todd Olson and Steve Warren for taking the time. Not too many
people has had the opportunity to try both, I guess. I suspect my E-mail
link is a bit flakey too, so my apologies to all those who sent me mail
and didn't receive a reply from me (I try to acknowledge them all.)
The short of it is that I purchased the Hardframe (despite the store's
sales people whose attitude nearly caused me to walk out). My drive is the
Rodime 1400RX that Morris Ng was selling on the net several weeks ago. I
did have some problems with the MAXTRANSFER. The diskperf program I have
would give read/write errors whenever it tried buffers 128K or larger. After
a day or two of trial and error, I found that setting the MAXTRANSFER to 64K
eliminated all problems, although Microbotics claims the 128K default should
work just fine. Does anyone have any idea why it doesn't?
Here are the results from the diskperf program found on Fish Disk #187
using one partition (empty), FFS, 20 DOS buffers in public memory (my actual
configuration uses two 70 meg partitions, 30 DOS buffers in fast memory and
is slightly faster):
Drive specifications: Rodime 1400RX (SCSI ID: RODIME 3000S), 5-1/4" half-
height, 144.1 megabytes formatted, 24 ms average access time, embedded SCSI
controller.
File create/delete: create 19 files/sec, delete 55 files/sec
Directory scan: 104 entries/sec
Seek test: 128 seeks/sec
512 buffer: 98304 bytes/sec read, 29181 bytes/sec write
4096 buffer: 192989 bytes/sec read, 169125 bytes/sec write
8192 buffer: 317750 bytes/sec read, 250655 bytes/sec write
32708 buffer: 587986 bytes/sec read, 317750 bytes/sec write
131072 buffer: 616809 bytes/sec read, 357469 bytes/sec write
524288 buffer: 622916 bytes/sec read, 361577 bytes/sec write
It's not the fastest in the world, but I'm happy. Unfortunately, now I have
to find another place for my 5-1/4" floppy drive.
What follows is a summary of the two replies I received.
--------------------
From: Todd Olson <olson@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Return-path: <olson@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 89 00:39:22-1000
Message-Id: <8911211039.AA22992@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
To: jhlee@hac2arpa.hac.com
Well I have a Kronos and have had the pleasure of setting up 2 Hardframes.
The easier by far to set up is the hardframe. The Kronos controller is
very hard to setup. I have setup a total of about 7 hard drive systems for
the amiga, and the Hardframe wins by far. As for performance the Hardframe
seems to be better for high speed data transfer (9600+) as you have
to disable the interupts on the kronos to get the hi-speeds quoted in C-ltd
ads-spec sheets. I would go for the HardFrame.
Olson@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
--------------------
From: swarren@eugene.uucp (Steve Warren)
Message-ID: <3302@convex.UUCP>
Date: 21 Nov 89 21:02:38 GMT
References: <321@sed170.HAC.COM>
Reply-To: swarren@convex.COM (Steve Warren)
Organization: Convex Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx.
The reason the Kronos can beat a DMA controller is because it has a 16-bit
path to memory. Other controllers only have an 8-bit path to memory. I
think that they have a significant performance improvement over other
controllers because of the path-width advantage. Their literature is
misleading, claiming that DMA controllers are fundamentally inferior
when there is chip-ram contention. This is a false claim, and it is
also unnecessary if the disk-perf results they published are true.
(Their disk-perf results were significantly better than all the others)
--Steve
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
{uunet,sun}!convex!swarren; swarren@convex.COM
---------------------
The last was posted to comp.sys.amiga and a followup was posted by Dave Haynie
regarding some items stated by Mr. Warren. Refer to Mr. Haynie's articles
for more.
Again, thanks to everyone.
--John Lee
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+--------+ John Lee
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+--------+ ARPAnet: jhlee@hac2arpa.hac.com
Hughes Aircraft Company
The above opinions are those of the user and not of those of this machine.