SE/30 booting off CF success

[ojfd]

Spartacus,

When you open "FWB Configure" application and press on large "Control" button on the right and then go to "Edit Mode Pages" and open Parameter Nr. 2 window, what does it show?

See attached example below. Your parameters probably will be different, since mine is UW LVD drive on Adaptec.

 

[JDW]

I just had a Chat session with Ben at OWC regarding their LEGACY series SSDs. I thought it would be relevant to our discussion here. Ben said that vintage Mac owners in the past have used this formatter/driver for use on their SSDs (for example, when used on a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet running OS 8 ), and have experienced a noticeable performance boost:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Intech%20Software/STCDHD/

However, he could not tell me if those customers ran any benchmarks, nor did he say how they rated that performance, other than to say "it feels faster than a spinning platter drive."

Since it is clear that the driver and driver settings have a bearing on performance, and seeing the default settings produce lackluster performance (as evidenced by your benchmark speed reports here), it may be worth trying SpeedTools to see what happens.

 

[IamSpartacus]

ojfd, it looks like this-

 

[ojfd]

Oh, it doesn't allow to change anything there... :-/

Next step - I'd like to see settings on Mode Pages 1 (Read/Write error recovery) and 8 (Caching)

 

[JDW]

Or just try this to see if it solves the performance problems, without needing to spend more time tweaking unknown settings:

http://www.intechusa.com/HDInfo.html

 

[JDW]

Since this thread is focused on flash drive solutions for our vintage Macs, I felt this would be appropriate.

Last night I commented on OWC's blog about their Black Friday 2011 specials. I noticed that they had specials on all their SATA SSDs but none on their "Legacy" IDE/ATA edition SSDs that are for vintage Macs. Having recently acquired some old PB G3 Wallstreets, I also commented about discounts on batteries too. Today, Grant at OWC kindly replied that he would take my words under consideration.

So as to not let this chance die (for truly, I am only one man asking about this), I wanted to post here to encourage those of you interested to reply in kind. Specifically, if you've ever pondered putting a true SSD, not just a CF card, in your vintage Mac, now is the time to seek out a discount and do it! I would therefore strongly encourage you to post a comment on OWC's blog if you would be encouraged to buy an OWC SSD if they offered a good enough discount on them.

Here's the Black Friday Blog:

http://blog.macsales.com/12693-holiday-deals-from-owc/comment-page-1#comment-49219

And here are the 3 product pages I mentioned in my comment on the OWC blog...

40GB Legacy 2.5" SSD:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMLP040/

PB G3 Wallstreet PRAM Battery:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/PRAMPBG3WS/

PB G3 Wallstreet Main Battery:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/BAPLLIWSRS/

And while pondering whether or not to post a comment there, keep in mind, "Ask and ye shall receive!"

Thanks!

 

[IamSpartacus]

JDW, I didn't have time to try HD speed tools for a while, but it worked. Read speed is ~1700kb/sec, and stable. Thanks!

 

[JDW]

But, Spartacus, the write speed is still significantly slower than an old spinning platter hard drive. I read that part of your report and I am still quite curious as to the technical reason WHY. If one contends that such is the limitation of the CF card itself, then logically one would expect to see different throughput scores when you try different CF cards (some fast, some slow). But if you test various CF cards and if the WRITE performance remains locked at that unusually slow 500kB/s, then I would be led to suspect that even the HD Speed Tools driver is not tuned to accelerate Write speed, at least not on flash disks for some unknown reason.

In practical terms, you will probably get more benefits from the fast READ speeds anyway, so you can always tell yourself, "the slow Write Speed doesn't bother me much." Even so, I am still curious about that point and would like to hear the thoughts of other technically minded people as to why this may be the case, and what, if anything, could be done to fix it.

 

[Udo.Keller]

If one contends that such is the limitation of the CF card itself, then logically one would expect to see different throughput scores when you try different CF cards (some fast, some slow). But if you test various CF cards and if the WRITE performance remains locked at that unusually slow 500kB/s, then I would be led to suspect that even the HD Speed Tools driver is not tuned to accelerate Write speed, at least not on flash disks for some unknown reason.

The HDST driver, in combination with a CF card and an Acard SCSI-IDE bridge delivers more or less the same performance as a spinning platter HDD behind the same SCSI-IDE bridge. This is true for a G3 Powermac, but not for the SE/30: http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17047&start=82

The very same CF card with the very same HDST driver and the very same SCSI-IDE bridge shows better performance when used with a Macintosh that has a more performant SCSI bus. Both read and write performance reach the same level.

Summary:

(1) The bottleneck for write performance is not in the CF card itself. The very same card gives better results when combined with a faster Macintosh host.

(2) And it is not in the SCSI-IDE bridge itself, neither the AztecMonster nor the AEC-7720U. The very same bridges show better results when combined with a faster Macintosh host.

(3) The SE/30 SCSI bus itself is not the bottleneck, too. The very same SE/30 shows better results with a real spinning-platter SCSI HDD.

Do you agree so far?

Then, the limitation seems to be in the combination of Macintosh SCSI bus and SCSI-IDE bridge.

What do you think?

 

[JDW]

the limitation seems to be in the combination of Macintosh SCSI bus and SCSI-IDE bridge.What do you think?

I've long thought it was the IDE-SCSI interface slowing things down. I just couldn't prove it. I still can't. But if we had a true SCSI SSD to test, that would give us much more evidence. But as far as I know, such drives don't exist. Even OWC's SSDs are either SATA or ATA/IDE.

 

[IamSpartacus]

From what I've observed, the four factors are the scsi-ide bridge, the scsi bus, the driver, and cpu speed. All other things being equal:

1) An IDE drive and an IDE CF card exhibited equal performance problems when used with the bridge

2) The choice of driver made a profound difference in speed.

3) Using a slow HDT driver, transfer speed jumped from 500k to 800k with the addition of a 50mhz daystar powercache.

4) A faster machine (quadra 840av, in my case) has fewer issues with the CF drive (the performance difference is still there, just smaller)

At this point I'm convinced it's just a matter of driver optimization for the nuances of a scsi-ide bridge. A poorly optimized driver would show the most symptoms with a narrow, slow SCSI bus and a slow CPU.

 

[ojfd]

One should not expect wonders from an old NCR 53C80 SCSI chip.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29470?viewlocale=en_US

 

[JDW]

One should not expect wonders from an old NCR 53C80 SCSI chip.http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29470?viewlocale=en_US

This is a repeat of the same old thing numerous people have cited time and time again. But such arguments slap logic right in the face.

It's not about slow SCSI chips in the SE/30!! If we can get 1700kb/s READ and 1700kb/s WRITE with a spinning platter drive on an SE/30 that has that slow SCSI chip, can one then argue that "it's the SCSI chip!" when a CF card gets 1700kb/s READ but only 500kb/s WRITE? Poppycock! I say no!

You can tell me that the SCSI chip in the SE/30 limits the maximum READs and WRITEs to 1700kb/s. I will accept that based on the benchmark evidence I've seen. But that does not explain why the "slow SCSI chip" would limit the speed of SSDs to much less than 1700kb/s! Don't compare the SE/30's SCSI chip with any other Mac. We know it's slower than other Macs. But that is irrelevant to this discussion! We are focused on the SE/30's SCSI chip, and we know the upper limits of the throughput it allows. Therefore, the fastest throughput is what we must focus on.

Putting it another way, the benchmark speeds of spinning platter drives in an SE/30 have become our "reference standard" because we are not seeing any "faster" benchmark speeds from SSDs (even if some contend the SSDs "feel" faster). Therefore, it doesn't matter if the SE/30 has a slow SCSI chip. It doesn't matter if the SCSI chip in the SE/30 is slower than other Macs. None of that matters. What matters is this. How fast are the READs and WRITEs of the fastest spinning platter hard drives when used internally to the SE/30? (From what I can see, it's about 1700kb/s max for READ & WRITE.) And then what is the maximum READ and WRITE speed of the best SSD in the SE/30? (From what we have seen with the Intech HD Speed Tools driver, its about 1700kb/s for READ, but only 500kb/s for WRITE, on a particular SSD setup). So if the upper WRITE speed limit is 1700kb/s for this "slow SCSI chip" why then does a flash drive get only 500kb/s WRITE speed? You cannot argue with me that "it is the slow SCSI chip"!

So as you can see, the SCSI chip is not the limiter of READ/WRITE throughput insofar as our reference standard is a spinning platter drive that we know to get a max of 1700kb/s for READ and WRITE, versus slower WRITE speeds on SSDs tested thus far. Hence, the most logical course of action is to focus our time and energy on the real potential sources of the slow-down:

a) The SSD itself (we've not yet tried an OWC SSD, but the CF cards tested here seem to indicate it's not the SSD itself)

B) The IDE-to-SCSI interface of the SSD (which is what we've started to ponder recently)

c) The software drivers (which I've long thought was the root cause of the slowdown, and we can see Intech HD SpeedTools did max out the READ throughput!)

So it's not about a "slow SCSI chip." Nor can it be about the CPU of the SE/30 either, for reasons I stated above. It's all about (a), ( B) and/or ©.

 

[ojfd]

Since you so nicely summarized everything,

Hence, the most logical course of action is to focus our time and energy on the real potential sources of the slow-down:
a) The SSD itself (we've not yet tried an OWC SSD, but the CF cards tested here seem to indicate it's not the SSD itself)

B) The IDE-to-SCSI interface of the SSD (which is what we've started to ponder recently)

c) The software drivers (which I've long thought was the root cause of the slowdown, and we can see Intech HD SpeedTools did max out the READ throughput!)

it seems that you have a plan on how to address the issues outlined above. Care to share the details of it with the rest of the forum readers?

 

[JDW]

Plan © has partly been implemented already. You can see that if you read through previous posts. OWC recommended HD Speed Tools to me for use with their own SSDs, so I posted about that here, Spartacus then tried it out and found it sped up his CF card READ performance. So as you can clearly see, that part of the plan has been implemented, at least on the hardware Spartacus owns.

Plans (a) and ( B) are things we are all doing or wanting to do here. I myself have just been trying to influence OWC to be more fair on their LEGACY SSD pricing so I can then buy a couple and begin testing of my own. Those are IDE drives though, not SCSI. So I would need to use an IDE-to-SCSI interface on one to make it work in an SE/30. And that's where the experimentation will come in, to see if that IDE-to-SCSI interface is the bottleneck. But if I connect an OWC SSD via a generic IDE-to-SCSI interface and find that both READ and WRITE speeds are hitting our experimental maximum of 1700kb/s, then I must conclude that either something is better about the OWC SSD versus a standard CF card (which makes logical sense because a CF card is technical NOT an SSD), or it could just be a coincidence of my choice in the IDE-to-SCSI adapter.

But the point of my previous post was the the SCSI chip is largely irrelevant if we are comparing oranges to oranges. Since this thread is entitled "SE/30" I have been focused on that. And although testing on non-SE/30 machines isn't a bad thing, any benchmarks on those other Macs will not be directly comparable with the SE/30 benchmarks in terms of raw performance. Indeed the SE/30 is slower than most because of its slow SCSI chip. However, I don't see the SCSI chip in the SE/30 as having anything to do with limiting the WRITE speed of an SSDs in light of the fact that same SCSI chip is not limiting the speed of a regular spinning platter hard drive.

 

[duxbridge]

For those that have successfully implemented a CF replacement, I am very keen on gaining some insight.

So far I have tried unsuccessfully to get my SE/30 to recognise my CF card.

I've tried the following methods:

1) Mounting the CF on the external SCSI port (the disk is not recognised by the OS)

2) Cloning a known bootable disk on CCC and mounting the CF internal SCSI port (the question mark disk appears when I boot up)

Any tips? Will mounting the CF internally as a secondary drive work? What am I doing wrong? :?:

 

[Bunsen]

What adapter are you using?

(the disk is not recognised by the OS)

ie, you get an error message saying the above, and asking if you want to format it? That would be the expected behaviour.

If you have formatted it on an OS X machine, it will not have the low-level drivers installed to run on a machine of that age, unless you check the box for "Intall OS 9 drivers" in Disk Utility - and, IIRC, later versions of OS X removed even that. My suggestion would be to format it from the SE/30 with the patched version of Apple Disk Tool, or with Lido, HD Toolkit, etc. The patched version of the Apple formatter is required to detect and format drives that do not have Apple-certified ROMs.

Similarly, I have my doubts that CCC will do what you need.

 

[duxbridge]

Bunsen,

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I know it is possible, but I can't get it to work? :?:

http://synack.net/~bbraun/idecf.html

http://synack.net/~bbraun/ridsce.html

What I meann by the OS does not recognise the CF is that it does even show up on the screen nor does it show up when I scan the SCSI bus for it, it's like it's not there, I've tried to troubleshoot using the different SCSI IDs, but to no avail, it's like it can't find the CF! :?:

 

[Bunsen]

You need CF cards that identify themselves to the host as fixed media drives, not removable. I quote from the product page for an active converter called TrueIDE (which may help you if it is less expensive than getting the right CF cards):

permits the use of CF cards that regular (passive) converters will only show as removable devices. The active part of TrueIDE parses the data stream that is exchanged between IDE controller and the CF card, and whenever the IDE controller checks for removability, TrueIDE will report back that the media is "fixed". This will allow installing and booting any operating system from a CF card.

Of course, find out whether your existing cards are able to work in fixed mode first, before replacing them or buying this. If they can, that's not the problem.

Also, as described at your first link:

An additional side note on CF cards. Some IDE controllers require UDMA to function properly. Most CF cards (none of the ones I've tested with) support UDMA. Some higher end ~300x CF cards do support UDMA and will likely have better compatibility results than what I've tried. They're also much faster.

 

[JDW]

While my experience doesn't help improve things, it may be interesting to note. I have an 8GB Seagate branded Micro-Drive (spinning platter drive, not flash) which I formatted and then installed OS 9, and then I put it in a PCMCIA adapter and inserted that into my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet PDQ. I can select it as a boot drive using Startup Disk, but my Wallstreet won't boot from it at all. Perhaps this relates to what Bunsen was saying?