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SE/30 booting off CF success

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
FYI, the Acard aec7720u SCSI to IDE converter will work with an old mac flawlessly. I have system 7.5 installing on a flash card right now. The compact flash card is a Sandisk extreme IV, so I have high expectations for disk benchmarks. Will post numbers soon.

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
SE30CF.gif


Bam. It was an ordeal getting HD Toolkit to run on this setup, as it requires 7.5.3. 500k a second is surprising, and quite a bit less than the SE/30 should be capable of. This same flash card setup did 5 megs/second on my 840av with 1500 operations. Still, the access time and seek time are quite nice, and it boots extremely fast.

Anybody have any tips as to how to speed the transfer speed up?.

 

JDW

Well-known member
It seems you haven't read through this recent discussion yet:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17047

Even though it's time consuming, you'll find a lot of info by going through most all the posts. And at the end, you will see my repeated call for benchmarks other than the FWB. I suggest you run the Norton System Info benchmark and then post the results.

 

tt

Well-known member
Cool. I would look into using another benchmarking software to see how the results can vary based on the methodology.

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
I found that thread this morning, very interesting. HDT is appealing as a benchmark because it gives absolute results, rather than numbers relative to a classic or 6100.

Pretty sure I have an old norton CD around. Will give it a try.

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
se30cfnorton.gif


Norton corroborates the results. I've timed large file transfers, too. There's a very real and unexplained 530k/sec transfer limit.

None of the few jumper settings on the 7720u and CF adapter are relevant to this problem, either. Not sure where to take it from here.

 

JDW

Well-known member
Thank you for testing with Norton. Well, all I can say is that other claim "it FEELS faster" than a regular spinning platter hard drive. But if that is true, then I would expect to see scientific evidence of such in the form of drive benchmarks that reveal "why" it FEELS faster! Because all I see is evidence that shows CF cards to be MUCH SLOWER!

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
The random read test is quite good, so any task that accesses a lot of small scattered files would do well. But yeah, I have to agree with you. At this point the only solid advantage to the CF setup is its silent operation.

 

techknight

Well-known member
and not to mention, replace SCSI HDDs that are slowly disappearing from the market.

instead of CF, i think SCSI->ATA/SATA would be much better honestly.

 

TylerEss

Well-known member
When I was working a lot on my SE/30 with a 7200RPM SCSI drive in it, I noticed a *large* gain in sequential transfer speed by upgrading to the 7.5.5 Drive Setup drivers instead of HD SC Setup. There might be some notes about that on my website, I'm not sure.

If you're running 7.5.5 on that SE/30, try updating the hard disk driver with patched Drive Setup and see if the figures improve.

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
Initializing the drive with a patched drive setup results in a very fast drive, but it's too unstable to use for anything besides benchmarks. Every time I've tried to install or copy anything, it spews bus errors. I've compared all the drive settings I could find in HDT for both slow and fast formatted volumes, and they're identical.

I'll take another swing at this in the morning.

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
Most recently, after formatting the flash drive with Apple HD SC setup and trying to copy ~3mb of Monkey Island to the drive:

Sorry, a system error occurred.

"Finder"

address error

After this the CF card is hosed, to the extent that it prevents booting. Then I stick it into my canon SLR, reformat it, reinsert it into the mac, and start over. Use of the apple driver seems to be fatal after few seconds of writing. The HDT driver is at least functional, if slow.

 

JDW

Well-known member
Well, since Tyler recommended that driver, perhaps Tyler can provide the solution? ::)

 

TylerEss

Well-known member
I have two ideas, neither of which may be the right ones.

Did you switch to HD SC Setup (as you linked) or Drive Setup?

Drive Setup is the newer of the two, and is the driver that improved the disk access speed in my SE/30 with a 7200RPM SCSI drive.

If you tried with HD SC Setup, I'd try again with Drive Setup.

This and this may be of some help.

Cheers!

 

IamSpartacus

Well-known member
I've tried both Apple HD SC Setup and Drive Setup 1.6.

I'm much closer to solving this now. The issue is in how Drive Setup is patched with device settings so it recognizes the flash drive.

Using ResEdit, I would open Drive Setup and add a device entry called "SANDISK,*", which would then make DriveSetup recognize the device as compatible. This new entry is given a blob of hexadecimal gibberish that is usually borrowed from a different device in the list. I used the settings for a generic quantum scsi drive. This failed. Generic IBM settings failed. Generic seagate settings failed.

It wasn't until I used the drive settings for a generic ATA drive that my flash card could be used (even though it's connected to a SCSI bridge). However, the drive is now very slow again.

I then discovered that opening Drive Setup 2.X with Resedit allowed me to interpret what the hexadecimal blob means. Each drive definition has the following editable settings:

Driver ID - 48

AltDriver - 200

SCIC ID - 0

DrvrOptions - 0

TibType - 1

Blind Type - 0

Option Bits - 1024

Poll Byte - 0

HasPage30 - 0

Default - 0

Password Type - 0

Num Cmds - 7

The key settings seem to be Driver, Blind Type, Option Bits, and Num Cmds. "Option Bits" looks like multiple settings encoded into a single number.

 

ojfd

Well-known member
Each drive definition has the followingeditable settings:

Driver ID - 48

AltDriver - 200

SCIC ID - 0

DrvrOptions - 0

TibType - 1

Blind Type - 0

Option Bits - 1024

Poll Byte - 0

HasPage30 - 0

Default - 0

Password Type - 0

Num Cmds - 7

The key settings seem to be Driver, Blind Type, Option Bits, and Num Cmds. "Option Bits" looks like multiple settings encoded into a single number.
Spartacus,

What happens when you change

Option Bits

from 1024 to 512 ?

 
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