visinfo@ethz.UUCP (VISINFO Moderators) (06/29/89)
In article <41910@bbn.COM> denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste) writes: >I've got an A1000 with a Starboard-II, and being disappointed with the >performance of my Cltd controller and seeing reports here of much better >performance with the Starboard SCSI controller, I picked one up about three >weeks ago. I've been trying to get it to work with an ST-277N ever since. > >Like several people I've seen complain here on the net, >my performance initially was dismal with this controller. I've now got it >going at a quite respectable speed, and since the steps to this end were not >always obvious, I thought I'd document them in great detail. After reading the article of Lars Soltau about changing Interleave on Seagate SCSI drives we all wanted to speed up our harddrives with the A 2090(A) But it wasn't that easy. I thought I could patch Prep or the hddisk.device. Because this couldn't be done I began to study the SCSI low-level commands and found out there I could do a lot with them. So I started to write some SCSI utilities which use the new standard device command 28 (HD_SCSI) of the newest hddisk.device to find out things about the drive and to control it. Currently there are two Utilities which are almost distributable: - SCSIformat: Low-level format with Interleave - SCSIinfo: Reads SCSI mode-sense pages to tell some interesting infos about your HD like: Serial Number, Physical Geometry, Size ..... After reformatting a Seagate ST277N and a ST296N I got really great performance with the 2090: Diskperfa with 32K buffer: 437K/sec Read and about 238K/sec Write These utilities should work on any device that support the new standard command 28 for low-level SCSI stuff. The old 2090 and the GVP don't! I don't support the old hddisk.device because it's really buggy (You can't have two drives and diskchange doesn't work). For the GVP I made special versions of these Utilities. I also wrote C-include files with all SCSI commands, errors and structures. As soon as these things are ready i'll post them on the Net and on BIX. So watch out for my SCSI Utilities! To Be continued..... /* -------------------------- SG (Simeon Graphics) ---------------------- */ /* Peter Simeon | // // */ /* UUCP: ...visinfo@bernina | // Long live the AMIGA! // */ /* BIX: hardwiz | \X/ \X/ */ /* ---------------------------------------------------------------------- */