rlcarr@athena.mit.edu (Rich Carreiro) (11/21/89)
THanks to all who responded to my queries. As I got many requests for the responses, I am going to post. Be warned - it is LONG. You asked for it :-) From: Dan Cogswell <cogswell@unix.secs.oakland.edu> Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller I have a 2000 with 6.0 motherboard and a Microbotics 8-UP! and HardFrame 2000. I've NEVER had any problems with my system and the SCSI I/F has been the best thing since sliced HAM in my opinion! It's fast, it's reliable, it's cheap (I paid $239), it's rugged (!), and it has just about every feature you could think of. You'd be crazy to buy something else. The only other board I MAY even think about considering would be the GVP, since it has the ability to put 2 meg (and is hard-card-able now-- see the newest AmigaWhird for info). Don't think twice, just get a HardFrame! As for the drive, all I can say is don't buy Seagate! Oh, you asked about SCSI v. ST-506. SCSI is far superior to ST506 for just about every reason you can think of: it's faster, it's more reliable in transffering data, it's intelligent, it maps it's own bad-sectors, you can hook other things to the SCSI bus, etc.. I have no affiliation with Microbotics. I simply am OVERJOYED with their products (and their support-- smart guys!). You can't go wrong with them, in my opinion. ****************** From: Jeff Bevis <bevis@en.ecn.purdue.edu> In article <15875@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, rlcarr@space.mit.edu (Rich Carreiro) writes: >I am looking for (at least) 2 Megabytes of 1mbit x 1 at 120ns or better >chips. Anyone have any, or can you point me to a source? Please don't RAM prices have very recently taken a nosedive. This, however, has gone on somewhat under the noses of most people (ie, gone unnoticed). A chip such as you are seeking would have cost you around $50-$60 nay but a few months back. Currently, I believe the best price is around $13 from JameCo Electronics, Inc., of California. The exact address escapes me, but their ads can be found in EVERY issue of Radio Electronics I have ever seen. They are a very dependable, efficient company from whom I order everything -- and I'm an electronics hobbyist/ engineering student. Take a look at 'em. I don't know who can beat their prices AND dependability. ************** From: dlleigh@media-lab.media.mit.edu >1) 80+ meg hard drive I have a Quantum Pro 80S 80 Meg SCSI 3.5 inch form factor drive. The access time is about 18 msec, but it has an on-board cache which knocks it down to about 12. Nice drive. Fast. I have no complaints. >2) controller must autoboot I have a 2090A. Autoboots just fine. The weird DMA problems have to do with contention between the disk transfer DMA and hi-res, overscan, four-plane images. I've never noticed a problem. Commodore is much more likely to support their own controller for future releases. >3) preferably can control more than one drive 2 ST-506 drives as well as several SCSI devices -- no problem >Should I get a SCSI? An ST-506? What is the difference? get SCSI SCSI SCSI SCSI -- repeat after me: ST-506 sucks moldy socks through a bent soda straw. SCSI is parallel. ST-506 is serial. ST-506 sucks! ********** From: dirks@kaa.eng.ohio-state.edu (William R.Dirks) Subject: Re: 1Mbit memory chips I have bought two sets of memory chips from I.C. Express (ad in Byte). They're prices have been consistently much lower (~20% less) than the next closest price I could find. Delivery was prompt and I never had any problems with the chips. ********** From: davids@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (60116000) Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller If you want to get a controller right now, I would suggest getting the Hardframe, with the following cautions. Check the motherboard revision in your 2000. If it's 6.0 or greater, you might have problems using the board, especially if your memory board is the Microbotics 8-UP DIP board (I was stung by this problem; at the time there was no fix available, so the company I bought it from (Go Amigo) swapped the machine for one with a Rev. 4.5 motherboard. BTW, I'm not sure if the fix actually works; I've heard conflicting stories. BTW again, I've had no problems since the machine swap). If you can wait, you might want to hold off and see what Commodore's A2091 has to offer. I've heard the performance might be better than the Hardframe (the Hardframe has the best performance currently). I don't know when the A2091 will be out. One more note, the Hardframe lets you mount a 3.5" drive on the card itself. Regarding SCSI vs. ST-506: I'd say go with SCSI. Performance is almost always better (ST-506 is serial, SCSI is parallel). You can only hook up two drives to the ST-506 controllers on the market for the Amiga currently, while SCSI controllers usually allow a max of seven. ********** From: ralph@atrp.mit.edu (Ralph L. Vinciguerra) To: rlcarr Subject: hard drive experiences I have a GVP controller, and found it to work just fine. Also, the people at GVP are very supportive, and have sent me upgrade PLA's at no cost. The drive I use is a 40 Meg ST157N (SCSI). It's O.K., but recently it has this problem of not spinning up when I turn my machine on. The motor somehow stalls. If I power cycle the machine a few times (slowly) it will get running. Also, this problem comes and goes. ********** From: EBERGER@B.PSC.EDU Subject: Re: Where is cheap RAM? Here is the place people have been going to for CHEAP Ram. ========================================================== The Chip Merchant 9285 Chesapeake Dr, Suite L San Diego, CA 92123 800-426-6375 619-268-4774 Fax: 619-268-0874 All shipments go second-day-air (shipping not included). Overnight express is available (something like $15). ********** From: Brian Rhodefer <brianr%tekig5.pen.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET> Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller >2) controller must autoboot The Commodore 2090A, the HardFrame, and the GVP controllers all do. Commodore's controller can't boot from a FFS partition, though, the way the GVP controller can, because Commodore didn't implement the Commodore-specified autoinstalled device driver the way GVP did. Go figure. >3) preferably can control more than one drive I've never heard of one that couldn't. >Some other questions - I have heard various pro/con arguments about DMA >controllers. So, what's the opinion out there? Will 1.4 and/or the ECS >change those opinions. My dealer recommends the GVP drive controller. >Agree? Disagree? So did mine, so I bought one a year or so ago. I like the fact that it'll boot from an FFS partition, but I've noticed that it isn't very speedy. Supposedly its sluggishness will be partially corrected through a new release of its control ROMs, but this isn't available yet. DMA controllers, such as Commodore's 2090A and, I believe, the HardFrame (MicroBotics?) are faster, but can overtax the Amiga's DMA bandwidth during some of the more demanding display modes. Commodore types have posted assurances here that these situations are rare, but they do still happen. >Should I get a SCSI? An ST-506? What is the difference? Well, the GVP controller IS SCSI, as far as I know, you haven't a choice. The difference between these two types of interface essentially boils down to how many of the drive's low-level functions (like head movement, surface selection, flaw mapping, etc) are taken care of by the drive itself, and how many must be taken care of by the controller. SCSI disk drives have local intelligence that knows how the drive is physically organized, how best to interleave it, and so on. The host computer's controller only needs to send commands like, "Give me blocks nnn through xyz", or "format yourself", and the drive's on-board smarts do the rest; this usually includes filling a respectably-sized buffer for a block data (or DMA) tranfer. The ST506 interface has dedicated wires for stepping the heads in&out, selecting which head to read/write, turning the motor on, and receiving or sending raw serial bitstreams. The simplicity, maturity, and high production volumes of the ST506-format hard drive make them a cheaper option, but the burden of taking care of soft & hard media errors, setting up the interleave, and so on becomes more the responsibility of the host computer software. Maybe I'm unduly biased by my poor experiences with the Janus Bridgeboard software, but I get the strong impression that Commodore's designers aren't very good at dealing with disk drives and their idiosyncracies. 'd rather trust the drive manufacturer to deal with these problems, and that's what the SCSI tends to do. Supposedly, its popularity will increase, narrowing the cost penalty for SCSI. ********** From: debonair@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Subject: Memory I got my RAM chips from UNITEX in Tustin California. There were cheapest of all the companies I looked through. I have not had any problem with my RAM chips. I had them over six months. Yes, I found the name in the back of the BYTE magazine. I got 80ns because the price was same for 80ns or 100 or 120 when I bought mine. They might have changed by now. They will certainly be lower. ********** From: debonair@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Subject: hard drive I use the SyQuest removable hard drive. Its formatted capacity is 44MB. Each additional cartridges cost only $80. The speed is same as the winchester hard disk. And yes it is SCSI which would be three to four time faster than ST506. Access time is 26ms (?) You can get the drive from Hamilton Havnet Computer DEaler direct for about $550. So for 44MB it would cost $630 for 88MB = $710, 132MB = $790 etc. Get the picture, almost infinte storage with $80 per 44MB. (You can have 44MB for each application!!!) Of course they wouldn't be on line all at once. You would have to change the cartridge each time you want to use the second 44MB. It fits into 5and1/4 slot so you don't have to open up your computer to change the cartridge. You do need a SCSI controller. GVP sells this drive as their own but the list price is $1400 or so. You can halve that if you buy direct from Hamilton Havnet. ********** From: arcarese@ANDROMEDA.RUTGERS.EDU (John C Arcarese) Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller Get a DMA controller. The 2090A only slows down w/ massive overscan, & with a 640X400X16 color screen there is contention w/ the controller. Since you have 2 meg. of fast ram, you shouldn't have to worry about contention. The Microbotics hardframe is also very nice, but may cost a little more, but you can mount the drive right on the card. Try to stay w/ Scsi, as C= seems to be heading in that direction; that doesn't mean you'll be out of bucks w/ an ST506, but if/when the 3000 ever appears, it might be easier to plop your scsi drive over. Any questions, reply back. ********** From: atheybey@ALLSPICE.LCS.MIT.EDU Originating-Client: flower The GVP controller is much slower than either the A2090A or Hardframe. IMHO, it is not worth the price GVP is asking, which is approximately the same as the hardframe & A2090. I have one, but only because I bought it used for $125. I haven't used it yet (no $ for a drive), but I expect it to work fairly reliably. I do have one data point: The guy I bought it from replaced it with a hardframe, and (with the same drive--a Seagate 277N) went from 150k/sec to 450k/sec. Summary of my opinion: Get a Hardframe or A2090. The only point against the GVP is speed--I have no reason to believe that there is anything wrong with it. ********** From: MENNINGER@PFCVAX.PFC.MIT.EDU Subject: A2000 stuff, image, etc. Rich, I've very much enjoyed the use of my A500 SCSI controller from C-Ltd. I thought it was defective when I first got it, but this turned out to be a problem with my Spirit Technologies memory board. A new PAL fixed that. Now everything works fine. 600K/sec read/write, and it's not DMA, so (1) it won't steal cycles from the CPU, and (2) if you get a faster CPU (an accelerator board), I *believe* you'll get better transfer rates (up to the limit of the controller/hard disk). Although the term "stealing" cycles from the CPU is nebulous, since in the non-DMA case, you're asking the CPU to do the entire job. So I guess point (1) is mute. I've heard of rates up to 900K/sec on C-Ltd's A2000 Kronos controller. Once you get to these speeds (as long as your hard drive is fast enough), you really don't wait on your hard disk much. I've noticed that during compiling C programs and copying stuff to/from RAM:, the hard disk light is off much more than it is on. It didn't use to be that way. I believe the Kronos 2000 controller goes for around $225 discount. Oh yes, and it auto-boots just fine, even from an FFS partition. As for SCSI vs. ST-506, I think most controllers for the Amiga are SCSI, so, in my mind, it makes sense to get a SCSI drive. If you get an ST-506 drive, then you have to get an adapter. The SCSI interface is plenty fast, as the C-Ltd controller proves. Lastly, and I know I've told you this before, I don't know much about 80 meg drives, but I'm very happy with my SyQuest drives. I now have two of them, each one being a 40 meg removable cartridge drive. This makes backups very quick (40 meg in 3 mins using diskcopy) and very painless. And you get 80 meg on-line storage while having an endless capacity of off line storage. The drives are fast (up to 1.25 Megabyte per second transfer rate is claimed, as well as a 25 ms access) and have been quite reliable thus far for me (I have had one for 1.5 years, the other for 2 months). Plus, they're *much* cheaper than a comparable Bernoulli 2 drive 40 meg cartridge system. They're $535 per drive and $75 per cartridge. Be sure and remember that when you're shopping for an 80 meg drive, as a comparison. They're both 5 1/4" half-height, so I'm not sure two of them would fit in your 2000, but you could start with just one, or you could get one as a backup to your 80 meg. One last point, the drive head never touches the cartridge (just like in a real hard drive *unlike* the Bernoulli system), so the cartridges theoretically have a very long life. ********** From: Ken Steele <kms@uncecs.edu> Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller Rich: I've got a GVP Hardcard (40-meg MiniScribe). The good news: It has been very reliable. No troubles so far. Also I have not noticed very many postings with reports of troubles with the GVP. It is autobooting, directly to FastFileSystem, and the installation procedure is pretty easy (although the documentation is poor). The bad news: It is not as fast as the DMA drives. I've run "diskperf" and seen the diskperf results from the HardFrame and the A2090a. It is definitely slower than them. The good news: The GVP setup hasn't run into hardware conflicts with the 6.1/6.2 motherboards on the 2000. There seems to be some well-documented conflicts between the most recent motherboards and the HardFrame controller. Avoid that combination. The good news: The GVP is a SCSI controller, and not a ST506 controller. The ST506 is a slower design. (Their advantage was that they were available and cheaper.) I hope this helps. Ken ********** From: bloom-beacon!think!ames!ucsd!pnet01.cts.com!wade (Wade Bickel) Subject: Re: Hard drive/controller A freind of mine has the GVP 030 board. He loves the board (though it took three to get a working set as he bought it as soon as it was out) but says the drive and controller are "a piece of crap". I recommend SCSI, as it gives the most flexiblity. ********** From: James Treworgy <JTREWORGY@EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU> Subject: 1Mbit memory chips I'm not going to say "look in Byte" but I will say look in Computer Shopper. CS probably has the best range of advertisements for chip dealers. I have bought chips from at least three different companies who have advertised there and never had any problems with quality, shipping, or anything. I just call several different companies, get a price quote, and buy from the cheapest one. ********** From: currier@wang.WANG.COM (Ronald Currier) I've bought a lot of stuff from Microprocessor's Unlimited by mail. The going rate for 1meg x 1 x 100ns is around $11 each (assume dip packages). I don't have their address/phone with me, but can get it for you if needed. If you order the parts by 7 or 8 pm their time, you can get them the next morning! I know a lot of people here who have used them, and never had a complaint. -- Rich Carreiro - Most Biased Boston Celtics Fan! Get well soon, Johnny Most! ARPA: rlcarr@space.mit.edu Welcome back, Larry! UUCP: ...!mit-eddie!space.mit.edu!rlcarr McHale, 6th man supreme! BITNET: rlcarr@space.mit.edu "Follow through!"