talmage@bu-it.bu.edu (David Talmage) (04/21/89)
Last night I attended the Boston Computer Society Amiga user group meeting.
It was supposed to be about choosing and installing a hard disk. Instead,
it was a local dealer, a nice guy but not too knowledgeable, showing us
some of the Great Valley Products we could buy from his store. This was
entertaining, to be sure, but not the informative meeting I expected.
I've pretty much decided on getting an 80-Meg Quantum drive but don't know
yet which controller I want. It should auto-boot; auto-booting from a FFS
partition is a plus. I suppose it should do DMA. It should be a SCSI
controller. It shouldn't slow down when doing disk i/o while Amy's working
with 16-color high-resolution screens.
With that in mind, who can recommend a DMA SCSI controller for me? I'd
like to know where you bought it; what kind of performance I can expect
from it; and any problems you've had with it. I'd also like to know what
you paid for it.
This is probably of general interest, but in the spirit of lowering
net.traffic, how 'bout if we do this by e-mail and I'll summarize within
two weeks.
Thanks for you help.
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David W. Talmage, Systems Programmer ...!{buita,bbn}!lti!talmage
Language Technology, Inc. talmage%lti.uucp@bu-it.bu.edu
27 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970 lti!luvthang!talmagetalmage@lti.uucp (David Talmage) (05/31/89)
Some time ago, I asked for the definitive answer on hard disk controllers. I wanted a SCSI DMA controller that autoboots from a FFS partition; that didn't slow down when doing disk i/o while Amy's working with 16-color high-res screens. After reading the A/C article on controllers and reading Bill Seymour's reply, I'm buying the Supra controller. My dealer is John Malloy at Soft Designs in Belmont, MA. Enclosed are summaries of the replies I received: jmpiazza@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Joseph M. Piazza)has a 2090A. He says he's satisfied with it. He's got 3 Megs of memory and so he doesn't expect to lose with 16-color high-resolution screens. Joe bought his 2090A from Go Amiga for $320. Joe also liked the Famous Salem Witch Museum, not as a controller, but as a tourist attraction ;-) About the time that my query hit comp.sys.amiga, Joseph Dawson <joseph@garfield.mun.edu> posted some interesting allegations about C='s 2090/2090A not working with Miniscribe drives under certain conditions. > 1) The bug in the old chip set would only happen to people who do > a lot of hard disk access or multi-task the hard disk a lot. In a follow-up, Joseph said that Commodore Canada told him there is a new chip set that may fix the problem. There were a number of replies to his posting and all of them said they'd had no problems at all with that combination. I sense some doubt in the collective mind of comp.sys.amiga but please don't take this to mean that I think Joseph is a liar. I recall no further postings from Joseph. If anyone knows if the problem is a real one and/or has been correctly resolved by Commodore Canada, please post a follow-up so we all can know. billsey@agora.hf.intel.com (Bill Seymour) has a Supra controller. He says it autoboots from FFS, is DMA and not troubled by graphics or overscan. With a Quantum Pro 80S, he claims Diskperf reads of about 550K/sec. Bill got his controller for about $200. fc@lexicon.com (Frank Cunningham) told me about his GVP hardcard. He says it was easy to install and seems to be reliable. Ease of installation, performance, and an open 5-1/4-inch slot (for tape) were his requirements in a controller. Frank didn't say so, but I infer from his message that he is happy with the GVP hardcard. To summarize the summary, in three replies I found three satisfied owners of three different SCSI controllers. There were two postings about possible problems with C='s 2090/2090A and MiniScribe hard drives; and several postings to the contrary. Disclaimer: Any errors here are probably mine. Please tell me about them by e-mail. David Talmage ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ David W. Talmage, Systems Programmer ...!{buita,bbn}!lti!talmage Language Technology, Inc. talmage%lti.uucp@bu-it.bu.edu 27 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970 (508) 741-1507
kaye@FSCORE.dec.com (05/31/89)
I have a A2000 + df1: - it worked fine Added 2090A and (2) Seagate 412's - flakey Added MEGAboard 2000 (2M) - couldn't write to harddrives without system crash Called CBM (Canada) - maybe Signetics 68000 - swapped - no change Finally had a friend bring his A2000 + 2090A + 2058 over. Found ECO on the 4.4 motherboard (a resistor on U604). Installed a same resisitor on my machine & everything works fine. Called CBM & they confirmed the ECO as required if expansion slots are used. Machine has been solid ever since. Note - 2090A cannot boot from FFS - so i have a 300k partition in OFS and transfer control to the large FFS partition. The main advantage of the 2090A is it can handle 2 ST506 drives & SCSI devices. The ST506 drives are cheaper and still quite fast. The Seagate 412's are old 10M slow drives, but i get good numbers from Diskperf & Devspeed. mark (Happy 2090A owner)
dca@kesmai.COM (David C. Albrecht) (06/03/89)
In article <2639@shlump.dec.com>, kaye@FSCORE.dec.com writes: > Finally had a friend bring his A2000 + 2090A + 2058 over. Found ECO on the > 4.4 motherboard (a resistor on U604). Installed a same resisitor on my machine > & everything works fine. Called CBM & they confirmed the ECO as required if > expansion slots are used. Machine has been solid ever since. Could you be more specific please? I have an A2000 with a rev 4.2 motherboard and a Micron 2M board. The Micron board and the 2090 have never played well together. I can run diagnostics on the Micron board till I'm blue in the face and they never fail but, just try and use MRBackup to back the disk up and GURU. I cranked max transfer down quite a bit and it makes it better but not perfect. If this could fix my problems with the Micron board it would be great. On my system U604 is a SN74LS245N, a twenty pin dip, like so: Back of A2000 +---+ 1 |o | 20 2 | | 19 3 | | 18 4 | | 17 5 | | 16 6 | | 15 7 | | 14 8 | | 13 9 | | 12 10 | | 11 +---+ Front of A2000 between which pins is the resistor? what value of resistance is it? Thanx in advance. David Albrecht