sdm@sequoia.cray.com (Stuart Mitchell) (06/08/91)
Well, it's now about 3 weeks since I posted my original question asking "whats a good choice of SCSI HD to hang off an A590", and quite a lot has happened in that time - I thought I'd post a summary of my experiences as there seemed to be some interest (from mail I received). Anyway, after my initial article I received several mail replies, the majority of which recommending Quantum as a good choice of drive. In fact one of the mails was actually an offer to sell a 105MByte Quantum for $300, from somebody in California, which I thought was quite a good deal. So I went ahead and negotiated to buy this drive - the only problem being that I live in the UK, so there were a few logistic problems concerned with getting a drive from California to the UK. It arrived the beginning of last week, but I didn't get around to doing anything with it til last weekend, as I was away for the week. I knew from reading the 590 manual that there was an internal SCSI connector as well as the external interface, so I thought the easiest way was to replace the existing Western Digital XT drive with the Quantum (using the existing A590 casing etc). After making up a SCSI ribbon cable I transferred the Quantum into the 590 controller and tried powering it up (booting from the 590 setup floppy) and it worked !! These things must be a lot more resilient than people make out - after travelling more than 6000 miles via UPS and courier I was concerned whether it would spin up at all, and so was somewhat relieved when it did. So, having preped it I had to swap back the WD 20Meg drive to retrieve the data from it (I know, I should have had full backups already, but it was a good reason to do some cleaning up anyway :-). After backing up approx 15Mbytes onto floppies I put the Quantum back in the controller, setup my favourite partitioning scheme, and restored all the stuff from floppies. [Aside: any opinions out there about what's a "good" partitioning scheme for HD's ?] I wasn't sure if there was a "net accepted" method used for measuring hard disk performance, so I grabbed a copy of "DiskSpeed" off fish disk 329 and used that as it seemed to be a reasonable choice. And here are the results (all using 250kbyte buffers) - Max. transfer rates (measured using DiskSpeed 2.0) -------------------------------------------------- WD 20M: read: 154 kbytes/s ( 20% of RAM:) write: 123 kbytes/s ( 16% of RAM:) Q 100M: read: 624 kbytes/s ( 83% of RAM:) write: 583 kbytes/s ( 77% of RAM:) RAM: read: 750 kbytes/s (100% of RAM:) write: 750 kbytes/s (100% of RAM:) A marked improvement over the old XT drive !! I have to admit that this whole exercise turned out to be a lot easier than I expected, so I would recommend this technique for upgrading your harddisk capacity. And finally, a couple of questions: When I try and issue a "park" command it returns the error "Can't find Rigid Disk Block!" - does this indicate some kind of problem with the drive ? Or does the drive autopark anyway ? (in which case I guess explicit parking isn't that important) Suggestions for what can I do with the old 20Meg disk ?? - I guess I could put it back in the 590, put the Quantum in a separate case and use the external SCSI connector for the Quantum.....or is it possible to have both the internal connectors in the A590 in use at the same time ? Stuart (sdm@uk.cray.com)
frank@hfsi.UUCP (Frank McPherson) (06/29/91)
A few weeks ago I posted a request for information on which SCSI tape drives definitely work with the Amiga. Informative responces were very few, so I want to thank those of you who did tell me something for telling me. I'd also like to appologize to everyone who sent me a "me too" message for not being able to come up with more information. The Archive 2150S (150 meg scsi tape) works. The Amiga A3070 (150 meg scsi tape) works. The GVP drive works (Wangtek engine) and is also a 150 meg scsi. I don't know about any others, and the only one I've had personal experience with is the A3070. I can verify that it works, because I used one on my system. I received affirmations that both the Archive 2150S and the Wangtek work. Thanks again to all who responded, -- - Frank McPherson INTERNET: emcphers@manu.cs.vt.edu -