Hi,

This post isn't to cast blame just to point a common annoyance that can be found on eaby especially when buying ancient hardware.

I own a FastATA MK-IV controller from Elbox. On average I get about 5 to 6 MB's from my various IDE drives. Not bad by Amiga standards. So one day while wandering on ebay I noticed a Buy It Now item labeled as such:

"Commodore Amiga 1200 3000 4000 Elbox MEDIATOR UWSCSI Card Tested Fast!!"

It's a PC PCI board made by Adaptec (the AHA-2940U Ultrawide SCSI controller) that a nice chap made Mediator drivers for.

Always on the look out for things to speed up my Amiga 1200 Tower, I bought one along with some other stuff (like an 18G, 80 Pin SCSI drive and cable.)

Upon my parts arrival, I hooked everything up in about 15 minutes. Then I ran some tests. The results? meh... At best I got about 2.8 MB/s, half of the speed of my Elbox Fast ATA MK-IV.

I did notice that there was a bit less congestion on the Amiga side of things when copying files to via the Mediator/SCSI card but other than that it couldn't match the performance of the FastATA MK-IV. Searching online the author of the driver mentioned the speed issues are due to the mediator bus-board itself.

Did I waste my money? No. I needed to by a SCSI drive for my Phase5 BPPC card anyway so the purchase was not totally in vain.

So what's my complaint? Well, the wording on the ebay listing was a bit misleading.

1) "Super fast has both 68pin and 50 pin connectors faster than any amiga scsi board ever made! "
- No, not really. Maybe it may runs better on the A4000 Mediator bus-boards but definitely not the A1200.

2) "Rare find"
- Once again, not really. Since this is a PC board, you can find these cards everywhere on ebay.

I know the seller has good intentions but the wording was a bit optimistic and over-hyped.

ebay: The virtual used car lot of the Internet...

Drewlio77

@Drewlio77

well at least the thing works lol

Did you let the seller know your concerns so perhaps he could edit the wording?

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c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
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@klx300r

He delivered it a quick manner and it arrived in one piece so that was OK for me. Perhaps I had wishful thinking as well.

Drewlio77

@Drewlio77

Yeah this is the problem of not being able to try before you buy. It's better than the A1200 Apollo 040 card I bought off a guy years ago that was working when I bought it but when I plugged it into my A1200 it was broken already and some chip had fried. Best $200 I wasted probably.

What did you use to test the speed?

I don't know if I buy the reasons for slowness. For example I'm sure a Spider USB2 card can do 10MB/s over a flash drive. But I don't have the details. At the time I tested some USB card in an Amiga but I also tested a Deneb. Can't find any speed results online.

BTW good comment on the virtual used car lot.

Last edited by Hypex on 05-Jul-2016 at 04:08 PM.

@Drewlio77

I'm trying to setup scsi with the Adaptec card but for some reason the aic78xx.device is corrupt form aminet?? i.e HDTools doesn't see it & it doesn;t appear to be a proper tool file.

can someone send me a working one please?

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c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE

@Drewlio77
Quote:

Drewlio77 wrote: ... "Commodore Amiga 1200 3000 4000 Elbox MEDIATOR UWSCSI Card Tested Fast!!"

Hmmm - I'm wondering how it is meant:
"UWSCSI Card Tested; Result: Fast!!"
or
"UWSCSI Card Tested Fast!!"
like in "I made a quick test"...


Quote:

Drewlio77 wrote: It's a PC PCI board made by Adaptec (the AHA-2940U Ultrawide SCSI controller) that a nice chap made Mediator drivers for. Always on the look out for things to speed up my Amiga 1200 Tower, I bought one along with some other stuff (like an 18G, 80 Pin SCSI drive and cable.) Upon my parts arrival, I hooked everything up in about 15 minutes. Then I ran some tests. The results? meh... At best I got about 2.8 MB/s, half of the speed of my Elbox Fast ATA MK-IV.

Hmmm - I have the P5-CSPPC in an towered A4k, which has UW-SCSI onboard. From that I know there can be several reasons for poor tranfer rates:
- cable length (don't exceed the max. length)
- avoid "Y"-Connections
- UW-SCSI and SCSI-II devices on the same chain
- irregular termination of the upper 8 bit between the UW_SCSI part of the chain and the SCSI-II part
- irregular termination at the ends of the chain (you need active termination)
- do not use the built in terminators some devices have
- conficting LUNs

Furthermore, you should take into account that your Mediator (which has its own max. transfer rate) is plugged into a Zorro slot, which also has its own max. transfer rate (figures depending on which Zorro implementation you have: Z-II, Z-III or even Z-IV).
So with such a config I would not expect to get the full max. tranfer rate the host adapter is said to have, anyway.
I don't think you will ever get better transfer rates as with your SCSI host on your BPPC.

Quote:

Drewlio77 wrote: ... Did I waste my money? No. I needed to by a SCSI drive for my Phase5 BPPC card anyway so the purchase was not totally in vain. ...

Hummm - you don't necessarily NEED to have UW-SCSI devices.
I have only one UW device in my chain - a 4.3 gB HD.

The other HD (160 gB), as well as the CD-/DVD-roms and rams are all IDE devices connected to the UW-chain via ACARD UW-SCSI < - > IDE bridges (quite expensive nowadays - I still got them for roughly 70 DM each (= 35€) back in 1997/98).

Furthermore I have an SCSI-II tape streamer, as well as an external SCSI-II flatbed scanner on the chain.

At one end of my SCSI chain there is an UW active terminator. Next to it is the CSPPC, followed by the UW devices and the UW to SCSI-II actve terminator adapter, actively terminating the upper 8 bit of the UW chain (and making it an SCSI-II chain by that).

Next device is the SCSI-II tape streamer.

From here the cable leads to the SCSI-II slot bracket, where my scanner is plugged in.

The lower 8 bit are actively terminated by an SCSI-II terminator plug on the SCSI-out port at the back of the scanner.

Quote:

Drewlio77 wrote: So what's my complaint? Well, the wording on the ebay listing was a bit misleading. ...

Well, isn't that valid for most (all?) advertisements?

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Dandy
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