Benchmarking SCSI2SD Devices in a PCI powermac

[Skate323k137]

I recently decided to test out the v5 and v6 devices in comparison on my Power Macintosh 7500. 

The machine has 256MB ram and a 500 mhz sonnet G3 card.

Using norton to benchmark the disks I tested the v5 and v6 scsi2sd each on the internal SCSI bus and then on an ATTO PCI SCSI card. The net benefit of the scsi card was about 15% sequential read speed on the SCSI2SD v6, or 5% increase in random read on the scsi2sd v5.

Not surprisingly the v6 outperformed the v5 to an impressive margin. I settled with V6 on PCI, as the sequential read improvements save about 5 seconds for reboots, and apps seem to launch nice and quickly.

                 V5 INTERNAL SCSI BUS | V5 ATTO PCI CARD | V6 INTERNAL BUS | V6 ATTO PCI CARD
Random Read   :       520 K/s               544 K/s          1170 K/s           1153 K/s
256K Seq Read :       1253 K/s              1253 K/s         7843 K/s           9065 K/s

Random Write  :       377 K/s               406 K/s          680  K/s           675 K/s
256K Seq Write:       1440 K/s              1440 K/s         3912 K/s           3920 K/s

The V6 is supposed to top out at 10MB read, as is the power mac's internal scsi bus. Apparently the internal scsi bus hits it's practical (not theoretical) limit before the scsi2sd, since the ATTO PCI card is able to manage a bit more speed out of the V6.

 

[360alaska]

Do you have the original hard drive for comparison?

 

[Cory5412]

Interested in what your impression is of the performance when using the v6? Do things feel faster than with a stock or upgraded spinning disk? It sounds like either the v6 is better reserved for things that need even more performance or maybe a firmware update hasn't been applied or the config or the sd card is bad/insufficient?

I've been meaning to do this same test, but I was going to use either a beige G3 or an 8600, I just haven't had the chance yet, and I got stuck on the firmware updates for the scsi2SD v6, which I've been told by the US distributor are actually fairly important for stability and speed.

 

[Skate323k137]

I'll pull out one of the original drives and benchmark it. Both of my scsi2sd devices are up to date firmware wise. 

That said, with the V6 on either bus the read speed pretty much maxes out the internal bus. The machine runs great as far as apps and games, though I don't run it too hard.

I made sure to use nice/genuine "A1" rated cards. (my understanding is this is the rating wanted to run apps on modern smartphones where some apps are installed to the sd)

 

[Cory5412]

That's encouraging to hear, in general.

There are a *lot* of options for the mid-high end PCI PowerMacs, but there's a few nearby systems for which there aren't as many options where SCSI2SD could/should work really well.

I have yet to use either my V5 or my V6. Perhaps I should start with the V5 since development on that one's a bit slower these days and I think I already have the latest firmware, and just see what it's like.

I'm fortunate to mostly have working disks, and at least one SATA card so far, but it's nice to have options and it's good to know what to expect out of them.

 

[Skate323k137]

The machine is definitely very useable with just a V5. I used it like that for a month or 2 before ordering a V6.

Right now I have BeOS5 running on a V5 on the internal bus as well. BeOS doesn't recognize the pci scsi card as noted in it's docs. It works pretty well... Sweet16 runs an emulated iigs at 50mhz lol. 

Another cool benchmark is the norton overall disc score. The V6 got 600 as opposed to 160 for the v5. Those compared to the norton expected benchmarks for a powerbook 500 g3 and a powermac 7600/120 respectively.

Benching a seagate ST32272N now, the drive I got with the machine. 

 

[Skate323k137]

The results are in and quite interesting! 

The mechanical drive scored a 373 on the norton scale. So for Norton overall ratings:

Scsi2sd v6 - 600

Seagate   - 373
Scsi2sd v5 - 160

So at least with a 500mhz G3 upgrade, the V5 is a little bit of a bottleneck. Here is how the seagate breaks down to compare with the OP.

Random Read - 266 K/s

256K seq read- 4527 K/s

Random Write - 154 K/s

256K seq Write - 4642 K/s

The only place the mechanical drive "won" was in sequential write speed, by ~600K/S. 

Final verdicts:

A Scsi2Sd V5 only outperforms the mechanical drive for random read/write, sequential is actually several times slower than the physical drive.

A Scsi2Sd V6 will outperform the mechanical drive ~4x in random read as well as Random write. Sequential read is 2x faster, but sequential write is down ~15%. 

So unless you are writing a lot of data to disk to where 4.6M over 4.0M matters, a v6 is a substantial improvement over the stock hdd. 

 

[waynestewart]

It'd be interesting to compare all the available SCSI devices: the SCSI2SD versions, Artmixes SD & CF adapters, [SIZE=12pt]SCM PCD-50B,[/SIZE] Acard SCSI bridges and ?

 

[Skate323k137]

I will admit I don't know any scsi2sd alternatives, but I haven't really looked. Are there good scsi to CF or SD devices that claim over 10MB read speed? My atto PCI scsi card is 40MB but the V6 of course tops out at 10.

Edit... The cf aztecmonster claims 20mb. Perhaps I'll get one some day. 

 

[Cory5412]

One of the things I have and intended to compare with in my 8600 is a SATA card.

IDE cards for PCI Macs are also an option and are also good, but I'm not personally going to go there.

For Macs that use IDE boot disks (5x00/6x00, Beige G3, many '90s PowerBooks) another option is direct CF/IDE adapters, I know there's been plenty of discussion there.

This is all good wiki fodder, and I know other threads have been done comparing older SCSI2SD versions to some disks, the aztecmonster, etc.

One interesting thing is if we basically agree we're maxing out the 7500's possible disk performance with a scsi2sd V6, is comprisons with the CF PowerMonster have to be made with consideration to the fact that the SCSI2SD v6 is less expensive and easier to get than the CF PowerMonster. For systems with better SCSI than Macs generally have, it's probably worth considering either moving to SATA entirely using PCI/PCI-X/PCIe cards or using other adapters, such as ones that let you use SATA Disks on SCSI buses (Acard has a few, but they're fairly expensive, last I looked.)

 

[Skate323k137]

I'm in agreement with your last paragraph for sure, especially with the internal scsi bus, the v6 basically maxes it out. 

The only other thing I want to see is if a scsi2 disk is capable of benchmarking over 10MB on the PCI scsi card. But I don't have such a drive or device on hand. 

Regarding IDE I'm considering msata to pata for my pismo. I'm not in a hurry to open it while it's working fine though. 

 

[waynestewart]

What was the SCSI2SD formatted with?

 

[Skate323k137]

Can you clarify your question? The scsi2sd itself just has firmware and configs. Formatting is done via the mac once the device is installed. The virtual drives therein were formatted using drive setup on os 9.1. 

 

[waynestewart]

There was an old discussion here that got me wondering about formatting.


 

 

[waynestewart]

I have a Raizinmonster(CF) and a Fuzinmonster(SD) and was curious about how well they did on the Mac. I’ve been using them on the Apple II. The closest machine to yours I have handy is a 8600 with a 450mhz G3 card and 512mb RAM running 9.1. I don’t have Norton so I tried FWB. The Raizinmonster and Fuzinmonster are in external cases and I didn’t have time to remove them this morning. Will do that over the weekend. Also have a ATTO SCSI card I can install. Also have a Sonnet SATA card I can try.

The external SCSI bus is slow but since I only had a little time I thought I’d see how they did on it. I tried a couple of SD and 1 CF card.

16gb SanDisk SD sustained read – 4358 KB/sec   Sustained write – 4537 KB/sec

2gb SanDisk SD sustained read – 4757 KB/sec   Sustained write – 4114 KB/sec

2gb SanDisk CF sustained read – 4727 KB/sec   Sustained write – 4094 KB/sec

View attachment Picture 8 SD

View attachment Picture 9 SD

View attachment Picture 11CF

 

[Skate323k137]

Nice, looks like you're quite possibly [close to] maxing the external bus, since it's 1/2 the speed of the internal. That is assuming the external bus on the 8600 suffered the same fate as the 7500. I'd be really curious to see how they do on the internal SCSI bus when you get a chance. 

 

[waynestewart]

Haven’t used the ATTO cards in probably 15 years and the first three I tried didn’t seem to work. I’ll put those aside and maybe try them on another Mac before considering recycling them. I’m getting pretty low on ATTO cards now if those are history. Wasted a lot of time on them before I found one that worked.

Sonnet SATA card

with a SD adapter                    20834 KB/s read             19271 KB/s write.

Samsung 128gb 840 evo             20389 KB/s read             25315 KB/s write

Internal fast SCSI

Quantum Fireball 4gb             8142 KB/s read             7496 KB/s write

Raizinmonster (CF)              8323 KB/s read             8813 KB/s write

Fuzinmonster(SD)               8412 KB/s read             8919 KB/s

ATTO SCSI card

Raizinmonster (CF)             14361 KB/s read            14476 KB/s write

Fuzinmonster(SD)             17879 KB/s read            17992 KB/s write

Seagate 36gb 10,000rpm             24406 KB/s read             35339 KB/s write

Jackhammer SCSI card

Raizinmonster(CF)             14348 KB/s read             16093 KB/s write

Fuzinmonster(SD)             17923 KB/s read             16569 KB/s write

 

[Skate323k137]

Those are impressive marks! So with a good drive or CF adapter, a PCI card can smoke the internal bus it seems... 

 

[johnklos]

The internal bus will only ever do a maximum of 10 MB/sec. I have a Power Mac 9600 with an ATTO UL2D which regularly got 30 to 35 MB/sec with a 2 TB SATA drive on a SATA-IDE adapter, which was on an Acard 160 MB/sec IDE-SCSI adapter. The same setup gets upwards of 80 MB/sec in an Alpha machine