Amiga hard drive options - benchmark and comparison
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- Опубліковано 21 бер 2020
- So you've decided to fit a hard drive to your Amiga but should you go for a CF card, SD card or good old IDE drive?
In this weeks video i try to answer that question and benchmark each using a stock A1200, A1200 with 4mb memory expansion, A1200 with 030 accelerator and the CD32 with its TF330. Each benchmark is ran 3 times and I also test both scsi.device.43.35 and scsi.device.44.20.
Most people are using a CF card but the end results may surprise you...
and just so you know I did also try an SSD with a sata to ide converter but it would not boot.
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Music used in this episode:
A Prehistoric Tale - Main Theme
Speedball 2 - Main Theme
Zool - Rave
The First Samurai - Main Theme
Gods - Main Theme
Demo shown at end:
The Black Lotus - Rift
more CRG coming soon...
In my conclusion I didn't touch on the 2 scsi device drivers. If you are using media up to say 8gb in size then I highly recommend scsi.device.44.20. Its faster all round but is limited to that 4gb partition size. With media over say 12gb your going to be into more than 3 partitions which might get a bit much to manage so revert back to scsi.device.43.45.
Thanks for this real useful comparison. Time to try some of my old IDE drives out! Cheers, M
Interesting video, thanks for doing the legwork. I'm currently in the process of resurrecting my Amigas and I was going to use SD for convenience (already done a WHDload on CD32) but might have to dig out the old CF cards for the 1200 and 4000.
Currently swapping out my Cf Card option for a IDE Drive thank you Buddy finally Definitive Proof!
Great video, really appreciate it.
Thanks for the video. The choice of file system makes a big difference, too. I recently found out on my Amiga 500 with a pistorm2 CPU replacement running ShapeShifter (Classic Mac emulator). Emulation with my Mac hardfiles on a FastFileSystem ran very slowly despite pistorm acceleration being several magnitudes that of the original A500. Putting my hardfiles on a PFS3 (pfs3aio to be precise) made a huge difference. Perhaps a topic for another video? Keep up the good work!
Interesting. But thease are synthetic tests I think. The real performance check is when writing / reading multiple files at the same time, or with fragmented discs. I think then the IDE drive will fall behind. I have a CF-Card in my A1200 with an ACA 1233n, and think the speed is very good. (not yet compared with your values). Anyway, good video :)
Great work. I'd be curious if there is a measurable difference in seek times, and how boot times compare between these options.
WOW! I just had my mind blown - I'd never have thought that a mechanical hard disk would be the fastest. Thanks for doing all those tests on our behalf :D This video earned you a new Subscriber :D
I’m here because, I’ve just got my A1200 out of storage and it looks as good as the day (1993) I bought it! Time to mod me thinks 😉
I have two bits of info on the SD card front. First SD cards in a Digigear SD to CF adapter used in place of a true CF card are reported to be faster than the SD to ide adapters alone. Second there is new SD type marked A1 which reported to be better as an OS device than older types. I have two Pentium one systems I hope convert to solid state storage. The A1 type SD card is from a Raspberry Pi use case report. I hope this helps other retro computer people. keeping these old systems up is a challenge. Thanks and good luck.
I would definitely use an hdd myself on my A1200 but the indivision aga makes it impossible (no room). I use cf cards but they all start to mulfunction at some point or straight up die.
Toshiba 4gb Microdrive and a CF2IDE adaptor. That is the best choice.
Hi there. Great work on this comparison video. I seen it and wonder if you have tried an IDE2MSata ? I was tasked to get and old laptop to work again, and it was the harddrive that was beginning to give up (IDE harddrive). Finding a new harddrive for it was hard, but in the search i found a IDE2MSata 240GB for about half the price of a new IDE 40GB drive. After seeing your video, i wonder if you would try that as well.
As you said in the video getting new IDE drives is an issue. Absolutely agree HDs are the most performant. But if someone is reviving a 27 year old computer, their use case is they just want to get it up and running as cheaply as possible. For me the SD adaptor works fine if all you are doing is creating a WHDLoad build with a load of games. Disk performance for most games is not an issue since the majority of games were designed to run of floppy. Where you are reading only!
Interesting comparison ... Why are the results so much better on the CD32, compared to a similar accelerated A1200?
I'd say the biggest performance hit is the interface between the eide cable and the drive. I have a 128gb going through 2 interfaces, m.2 to sata then sata to eide. Theoreticly, i should be able to get 10mb/s but scsi doesn't play nice.
what about scsi.device.47.5 ????
With my 030 and 1200 i got little bit better results with SD card than exist CF Card :) Its the easiest to make HD image with PC too :)
did you ever get round to doing a follow up video on this i cant seem to find it ?.