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