Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!hacgate!tcville!sed170!lee From: lee@sed170.HAC.COM (John Lee) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Kronos vs. Hardframe--The Decision Summary: I bought the Hardframe. Keywords: Kronos, Hardframe, hard disk Message-ID: <327@sed170.HAC.COM> Date: 5 Dec 89 02:30:18 GMT Reply-To: lee@sed170.UUCP (John Lee) Organization: Hughes Aircraft Co., El Segundo, CA Lines: 97 About two weeks ago, I posted an article asking for comparisons of the Kronos and Hardframe controllers for my A2000, and opinions on which was better. I received two replies, one by E-mail and one on the net. I wish to thank Todd Olson and Steve Warren for taking the time. Not too many people has had the opportunity to try both, I guess. I suspect my E-mail link is a bit flakey too, so my apologies to all those who sent me mail and didn't receive a reply from me (I try to acknowledge them all.) The short of it is that I purchased the Hardframe (despite the store's sales people whose attitude nearly caused me to walk out). My drive is the Rodime 1400RX that Morris Ng was selling on the net several weeks ago. I did have some problems with the MAXTRANSFER. The diskperf program I have would give read/write errors whenever it tried buffers 128K or larger. After a day or two of trial and error, I found that setting the MAXTRANSFER to 64K eliminated all problems, although Microbotics claims the 128K default should work just fine. Does anyone have any idea why it doesn't? Here are the results from the diskperf program found on Fish Disk #187 using one partition (empty), FFS, 20 DOS buffers in public memory (my actual configuration uses two 70 meg partitions, 30 DOS buffers in fast memory and is slightly faster): Drive specifications: Rodime 1400RX (SCSI ID: RODIME 3000S), 5-1/4" half- height, 144.1 megabytes formatted, 24 ms average access time, embedded SCSI controller. File create/delete: create 19 files/sec, delete 55 files/sec Directory scan: 104 entries/sec Seek test: 128 seeks/sec 512 buffer: 98304 bytes/sec read, 29181 bytes/sec write 4096 buffer: 192989 bytes/sec read, 169125 bytes/sec write 8192 buffer: 317750 bytes/sec read, 250655 bytes/sec write 32708 buffer: 587986 bytes/sec read, 317750 bytes/sec write 131072 buffer: 616809 bytes/sec read, 357469 bytes/sec write 524288 buffer: 622916 bytes/sec read, 361577 bytes/sec write It's not the fastest in the world, but I'm happy. Unfortunately, now I have to find another place for my 5-1/4" floppy drive. What follows is a summary of the two replies I received. -------------------- From: Todd Olson Return-path: Date: Tue, 21 Nov 89 00:39:22-1000 Message-Id: <8911211039.AA22992@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> To: jhlee@hac2arpa.hac.com Well I have a Kronos and have had the pleasure of setting up 2 Hardframes. The easier by far to set up is the hardframe. The Kronos controller is very hard to setup. I have setup a total of about 7 hard drive systems for the amiga, and the Hardframe wins by far. As for performance the Hardframe seems to be better for high speed data transfer (9600+) as you have to disable the interupts on the kronos to get the hi-speeds quoted in C-ltd ads-spec sheets. I would go for the HardFrame. Olson@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu -------------------- From: swarren@eugene.uucp (Steve Warren) Message-ID: <3302@convex.UUCP> Date: 21 Nov 89 21:02:38 GMT References: <321@sed170.HAC.COM> Reply-To: swarren@convex.COM (Steve Warren) Organization: Convex Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx. The reason the Kronos can beat a DMA controller is because it has a 16-bit path to memory. Other controllers only have an 8-bit path to memory. I think that they have a significant performance improvement over other controllers because of the path-width advantage. Their literature is misleading, claiming that DMA controllers are fundamentally inferior when there is chip-ram contention. This is a false claim, and it is also unnecessary if the disk-perf results they published are true. (Their disk-perf results were significantly better than all the others) --Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------- {uunet,sun}!convex!swarren; swarren@convex.COM --------------------- The last was posted to comp.sys.amiga and a followup was posted by Dave Haynie regarding some items stated by Mr. Warren. Refer to Mr. Haynie's articles for more. Again, thanks to everyone. --John Lee ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raining CATS and DOGS? Join the RATS: Remote Amiga Teleconferencing System +--------+ John Lee | HUGHES | +--------+ ARPAnet: jhlee@hac2arpa.hac.com Hughes Aircraft Company The above opinions are those of the user and not of those of this machine.