@OldAmigan

Quote:

OldAmigan wrote: @Thread Is it still the case,then, that I'm going to need an HD anyway? If so,I may as well just switch to SATA and have done with it.

I bought some Delock SATA (HD) to IDE (controller) adapters long time ago to use SATA drives, but completely switched to SATA (using a sil3114 controller with U-Boot v1.1.4) in the end. I'm now using a Crucial BX100 250GB SSD in my A1XE. It's naturally not faster in terms of read/write speeds than a SATA/IDE harddisk due to the slow PCI bus. Still the system feels a little bit snappier (at least under Linux - OS4 is already lightning fast).

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A1XE: G4@933MHz, 2GB, refitted AC'97 codec
microA1: G3@800MHz, 1GB

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@Thread

Thanks for all the replies, folks.

I'm going to try the PATA - SATA adaptor route first and see where it leads me.

I'll update the thread once I've done it.

Many thanks

_________________
Fred Booth
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A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030
AmigaOne and OS4.1
Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0
Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
2006 Macb

Quote:

@MichaelMerkel regarding the kingston drives i found that: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand so maybe it is no good idea to try them l

Very interesting... Thanks for the link! I contacted my dealer and they told the firmaware of their Kingston V300 120GB is v. 605A. Thus there is already a newer version on the market! Maybe they have also a fixed the performance problem...?

@Tonyw
Tony, could you possibly check what is the firmware version your Kingston SSD has...? It would be interesting to know whether the superb performance you reported is due to the firmware/NAND you have!

Has anyone tested this with their NG Amigas:

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB ?

One of the major dealers over here stated that they have not got so far any complaints concerning Samsung SSDs, in contrast to many other brands...

...

Speaking of TRIM support, and especially the lack of it in AmigaOS... How serious is this problem? How dramatically will this lack shorten the lifespan of a disk?

Regards,

Gregor

@OldAmigan

I was, as stated, about to buy a SATA converter and SSD or HDD but I saw a post about DOM (Disk On Module) drives. These are essentially a flash card or SD or whatever in a module with either a PATA or SATA connection.
The upshot is, I bought one (64Gb) and plugged it on to my on-board IDE connector and installed OS4.1FE onto it.

It didn't boot!!!

After a few minutes, I saw that, as usual, it hadn't recognised the SLB.

I guess my brain woke up at that so I booted from the CD and copied the SLB from the CD to Sys: Libs and rebooted - success!

I have no idea why I never thought of that before but I also have no idea why, after setting up the HDD in Media Toolbox, it wouldn't see it anyway.

Really, I know that it's long been assumed that Amiga users should be a bit more computer savvy than most but why shouldn't the OS installer take care of that?

_________________
Fred Booth
========================================
A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030
AmigaOne and OS4.1
Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0
Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
2006 Macb

@Old Amigan

I've now booted and rebooted my A1XE several times, left it switched off for a couple of days then rebooted and so far, no problems.

I've also fitted a second RAM module, so I'm running on 756Mb of any-old-RAM without problems. The battery is quite old, maybe a couple of years and still no problems.

I'll now start to refit the PCI boards I used to have - SoundBlaster, Sil something-or-other and move the graphics card (a 9250??) to the high speed slot and see how it all goes.

_________________
Fred Booth
========================================
A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030
AmigaOne and OS4.1
Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0
Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
2006 Macb

@OldAmigan

Great to see this hardware last so Long.

@Gregor

Quote:

Has anyone tested this with their NG Amigas: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120GB ?

That's what I use on both the X1000 and X5000 and it works great.
As I don't want to lose all my data in case of hardware failure and don't really trust SSDs all that much yet, I use a pair in RAID1 mode in this neat little 2.5x2 to 3.5 internal RAID enclosure.
It doesn't require drivers, only mirrors the blocks without altering the format so the drives are readable without the enclosure, should it fail at some point.

The only noticeable performance improvement over regular HDDs seems to be seek time and delete operations. Everything else seems roughly the same to me.

I don't know how important the lack of TRIM support might be, but if it really makes a difference there's always the option of copying all the data to another drive and reinitalize / trim it in linux or on a pc.

@OldAmigan
Quote:

Really, I know that it's long been assumed that Amiga users should be a bit more computer savvy than most but why shouldn't the OS installer take care of that?

It's such a low level alteration that it may be safer to let the user or dealer handle it as the rdb may need to be modified, to make room for the slb, causing existing partitions to be forgotten.
The boot block slb isn't used on the X1000 and X5000, so that's one less issue to deal with.

@eder


Quote:

Great to see this hardware last so Long.

Even with all its design flaws, the XE has proven to be very reliable, at least mine has been running 24/7 for nearly 12 years so far. All i did to it was replace its ridiculous heatsink with a VF900cu vga cooler.

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AlexC's free OS4 software collection

AmigaOne XE/X1000/X5000/UAE-PPC OS4 laptop/X-10 Home Automation

@tonyw

Quote:

tonyw wrote: It loads the Kickstart modules from SSD in just over a second!!

I have a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB fitted into the X1000 since a few months now.

Pretty good, slight speed increase too, but i also don't get the massive speed up on booting.

How did you do that?
I can't believe that some SSD drives show such great performance differences, so it has to be something else...

Would you share your MediaToolbox settings for your drive?

@Gregor

Quote:

could you possibly check what is the firmware version your Kingston SSD has...?

Not sure how to do that, but if I call up the "Disk characteristics" page in MTB (Edit RDB/Install), it tells me that the Kingston SSD is a product type 50026B77490223F3, Revision 541A.

Dont know if that answers your question. Idetool can't interrogate the drive on the X-5000 for other reasons.

@Raziel

Quote:

Would you share your MediaToolbox settings for your drive?

What settings in particular? I just left it to MTB's defaults.

On the X-5000, I have five partitions defined, the first is small and contains only the boot program amigaboot.ub. The other partitions are all about 2 GB each and hold system images of various types (Final Edition, Betatest, etc, etc).

On the X-1000, I have also five partitions, roughly the same as those on the X-5000, but using amigaboot.of instead of amigeboot.ub in the "Boot" partition.

On both machines, MTB says the device block size is 512 B, I have not tried forcing it to 4096, but I am using 4096 B (logical) blocks on all system partitions, ie 8 sectors/block.

Note: It is only the X-5000 which loads Kickstart modules fast (it uses U-Boot and the Kingston 120 GB drive).
On the X-1000 which uses Open Firmware and a Kingston 240 GB drive, the Kickstart loads no faster than from a mechanical disk. I have checked the I/O and the slow read performance is entirely due to CFE - why, I don't know, but every other operation runs OK. Once OS4 is running, of course, it is lightning fast.

I wish I could try U-Boot on the X-1000 ;)

_________________
cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@tonyw

Quote:

Quote: Would you share your MediaToolbox settings for your drive? What settings in particular? I just left it to MTB's defaults. On the X-5000, I have five partitions defined, the first is small and contains only the boot program amigaboot.ub. The other partitions are all about 2 GB each and hold system images of various types (Final Edition, Betatest, etc, etc). On the X-1000, I have also five partitions, roughly the same as those on the X-5000, but using amigaboot.of instead of amigeboot.ub in the "Boot" partition.

Six partitions here.
1 GB BootOF
2 GB System
3 GB Tools
350 GB Games
10 GB Development
75 GB Storage
10 GB Cache
and
15.7 GB left unformatted, because i read somewhere that this is "needed" for garbage collection/TRIM/whatever to speed it up a little

Quote:

On both machines, MTB says the device block size is 512 B, I have not tried forcing it to 4096, but I am using 4096 B (logical) blocks on all system partitions, ie 8 sectors/block.

Ok, so the device block size is 512 (for my SSD aswell, with no easy way to force it up - at least, i won't try to find a way)
Logical block size is the one you can change in Edit Partition/Edit Details, right?
For some reason i have that set to 1024...will remedy it asap

Quote:

Note: It is only the X-5000 which loads Kickstart modules fast (it uses U-Boot and the Kingston 120 GB drive). On the X-1000 which uses Open Firmware and a Kingston 240 GB drive, the Kickstart loads no faster than from a mechanical disk. I have checked the I/O and the slow read performance is entirely due to CFE - why, I don't know, but every other operation runs OK.

Ah, may have missed the X5000 only remark.

Quote:

Once OS4 is running, of course, it is lightning fast. I wish I could try U-Boot on the X-1000 ;)

Hmm coming from a SATA drive i wouldn't call it "lightning" fast...there is some speedup and the whole system feels snapppier, but i'm still waiting for the mind blowing speed "they" propagate

Thanks for the info

@AlexC

Quote:

The boot block slb isn't used on the X1000 and X5000, so that's one less issue to deal with.

I thought the X5000 used UBoot? So how does it boot then?

@tonyw
Quote:

tonyw wrote: @Gregor Quote: Could you possibly check what is the firmware version your Kingston SSD has...? Not sure how to do that, but if I call up the "Disk characteristics" page in MTB (Edit RDB/Install), it tells me that the Kingston SSD is a product type 50026B77490223F3, Revision 541A.

That 541A should indicate the firmware version. It is newer than the ones reported to be slow in that article MichaelMerkel mentioned here, so it may indeed be a faster one.

Speaking about the block size, Mediatoolbox has a special 'expert' mode which is activated with a tooltype (PROGRAM_MODE=expert). It may be possible to modify the block size that way... But it is of course a little bit dangerous mode, not recommended for everyone .

Gregor

Nice that x5000 boots fast with ssd.

I have only x1000 and its the same boot time with ssd like with normal harddrive. However copying files from a partition to another in os4 was faster with ssd if i remember right. Man i wish x1000 booted faster. It feels like booting up a slow windows system on nonssd :')

@Gregor

I've used the Samsung EVO drives in my SAM before with zero issues, though the one I used was a 250 GB 840 model.

Was as simple as plug and play, and while I didn't use it in aforementioned machine for more than a month or two, I had zero issues with it.

I've never had a single issue with SSD's at all in my NG Amiga (SAM 440), regardless of all the brands I've tried (Patriot, OCZ, Samsung, Kingston, Intel, among others). All worked very well and OS4 booted up to usable desktop screen within 10-15 seconds, tops.

Good luck!

Last edited by Duce on 29-Nov-2015 at 11:37 AM.

@Hypex

Quote:

I thought the X5000 used UBoot? So how does it boot then?

It uses an amigaboot.of file on a regular partition or on the motherboard's CF card if you have one fitted.

_________________
AlexC's free OS4 software collection

AmigaOne XE/X1000/X5000/UAE-PPC OS4 laptop/X-10 Home Automation

Boot times on my SAM 460ex with an OCZ 30GB SSD on the sii3114 SATA PCI card (timed till Workbench loads):

- 45 seconds from Power On.

- 24 seconds after Hardware Initialization.

- 16 seconds after Kickstart Modules loaded.

My system also has a 640GB HDD (was used as my only drive before the SSD upgrade).

When I added the SSD as my boot drive I did not notice any drastic speed improvements but the SSD runs fine without any issues so I have no complaints.

Drewlio77

Last edited by Drewlio77 on 29-Nov-2015 at 06:15 PM.

XE boots in a few seconds from an HD drive. Seagate. Had problems with cables. Then the machine broke and it was in many different companies to fix the motherboard. Maybe put too much from the pio etc.
Not touching as it works.

Sil680, SBLive,512Kingston, not using the USB but in a cache external device.

Catchy and needy.

Quite an expensive hobby.. Waiting for the new net as this should be secure;)

@OldAmigan

Hi! I put a hybrid SSD/IDE drive into my micro AmigaOne last year. At first I did not notice a difference, but after 10 to 20 reboots, all of the sudden my boot time for OS4.1 R6 went down by 50%! Loading the kernel modules was almost instant!
It remained that way until I installed OS4.1 FE on a different partition. After that, things went back to the normal slower pace of loading all the modules. It turns out that my drive "remembers" the most used sectors and caches them to the SSD, so after a while things will automatically speed up, once you get past U-Boot that is.
Until I have rebooted enough times in OS4.1 FE - so that it exceeds how many times I rebooted over the months using the previous partition, my drive will not speed up. Once it sees that my most used sectors are on the Os4.1 FE partition though, it should speed up again.

Scott

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