griffin@frith.egr.msu.edu (02/17/90)
I have an older 2088 bridgeboard (boot up says PC-Emulator BIOS 3.4). I have a partition on my Amiga HD reserved for an autobooting MS-DOS drive. My problem is that things appear to be really S-L-O-W loading from it. I have several programs (notably PSPICE) that take about 3-4 minutes (longer?) to load and *begin* execution, but these programs load on an XT in a fraction of a minute. Running Norton's SI gives the expected 1.0 performance rating and a 0.9 hard drive rating. Does anyone else have this problem, or know what could be causing this?! That partition is Amiga FFS formatted if that makes a difference, but I have not changed the mask or anything as I have not had problems or errors in reading from the HD (Seagate ST277N). Dan Griffin griffin@frith.egr.msu.edu "We're waiting for Godot..."
akcs.clemon@wcbcs (Craig Lemon) (03/20/90)
>I have an older 2088 bridgeboard (boot up says PC-Emulator BIOS 3.4). I >have a partition on my Amiga HD reserved for an autobooting MS-DOS drive. >My problem is that things appear to be really S-L-O-W loading from it. I >have several programs (notably PSPICE) that take about 3-4 minutes (longer?) >to load and *begin* execution, but these programs load on an XT in a fraction >of a minute. Running Norton's SI gives the expected 1.0 performance rating >and a 0.9 hard drive rating. YOu think that's slow. Try running a PC HD on the Bridgecard and a JANUS partition on the Amiga side. The IBM drive transfers data at a maximum of 11K/sec. Now THAT's a slow harddisk. 0.9 HD performance isn't that bad. The actual problem is the bottleneck from the Amiga to the IBM bridgecard because of BUS limitations. If you are getting 90% of full IBM speed I wouldn't complain too awful much. If someone has gotten better maybe they did something different in their partitioning and such but I doubt you will ever get more than the 90% reading. PS. I have not had any experience with Amiga to IBM HD's except for JLINK but I used to use a JANUS partition from IBM to Amiga. -- _ Craig Lemon // |_| Kitchener, Ontario \X/ | | M I G A Amiga 2000 -- 2400 bps -- AmigaUUCP 0.50b ..!watmath!xenitec!wcbcs!lemsys!clemon ..!watmath!xenitec!wcbcs!AKCS.clemon ^^ Not Reliable Yet
a774@mindlink.UUCP (Wayde Police) (03/22/90)
I too have experienced the same problem of a 'fake HD' on the Amiga side being EXTREMELY slow for the Bridgecard. Nortons may say a relative index of .9 in your the previously mentioned letter but this just isn't accurate. I have tried a number of hard drive speed indicators, each giving varying results. CORETEST indicates an average seek time of 0.4 ms (yes!) but a transfer rate of 73.6 KB/sec. Not too good when you consider an 'average' hard drive and XT can do transfer rates of 150K+. Since I installed my SOTA286i accelerator Nortons gives an drive index of 3.6, but the transfer rate still hasn't changed. Seeks seem to be ultra-fast because it is a software program saying to the BIOS 'yup, you're there now' but the transfer rate stinks. To increase the rate I have experimented with many different fake 'interleaves', sectors/track, etc (with the MAKEAB program) but no change. I have tried increasing buffers in CONFIG.SYS, and also trying a disk caching program on the PC and no change again. It appears the Janus software is the bottleneck. Increasing PCDISKs priority makes no difference as well. uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a774 a774@mindlink.UUCP Wayde Police, Systems Developer - IMPEX Controls