Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: 2090A + ST277N Message-ID: <437@boing.UUCP> Date: 16 Oct 88 02:35:34 GMT References: <4783@louie.udel.EDU> Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca. Lines: 60 In article <> mp1u+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi) writes: >On a related note...does anybody have good things to say about the Pacific >Peripherals Overdrive? It seems to be the least expensive DMA SCSI controller >of the bunch, and I would like to know how well it compares with the GVP Impact >and A2090A. > I can relate some experiences. about 2 months ago I needed to hook up a maxtor 3380 scsi drive. These drive are being blown out right now while maxtor gears up with some faster hardware. The drive I have is a 300mbyte formated, 27 msec ave access time. I tried several controllers. The first one I had access to was the 2090a of course, it would not work. The prep would come back ok but when I rebooted, the first partition was not in the mountlist. I tried several combinations of sectors,heads, etc to no avail. So I went to HT Electronics in Sunnyvale, ready to buy the best board they had that would work with the maxtor. I knew they had GVP boards there and I had heard good things about it as well as I knew some people at GVP. However we were unsuccessful getting that board to work. I say we because I now had a group at HT really interested in seeing this 3380 run. Thad F. had his running on some other controller attached to his a1000. I think he had a Cltd controller. But they did not have any controllers there for my 2000. We then tried the pacific peripherals card, and after picking a close enough looking drive from their drive table, it came right up. When I got home, I played with it for awhile and then decided to repartition it. and it stopped working. I went to Pacific Peripherals up in Fremont and Lee helped me right out, I think my problem is I had put the scsi connector on upside down. I was feeling dumb. Since then I've been very happy, until I went to amiexpo. The good people of Micropolis (thanks Gayle) loaned me a couple of drives for my X system that I was going to be demonstrating. These were 320 mbyte 5 1/4" full heights like the 3380 I had but where 18 msec ave access time instead of 27 msec. My other trouble with the maxtor 3380 was with a sun3, but that is a whole nother story. Any way, the new micropolis, fresh out of the packing material came up instantly on the sun3, and the 2nd one worked on the 2090a board, once I got the switches set right. I expect the micropolis to work fine on the pacific peripherals board as well but I have not tried it yet. I'm not really sure that board does dma since pm shows the system floored when I do lots of copies, this does not occur with the 2090a as I recall. > >"my friends say she's a dumb blonde, but they don't know she dyes her hair" hee hee -- Dale Luck Boing, Inc. {uunet!cbmvax|pyramid}|!amiga!boing!dale Although I do contract work for Amiga-LosGatos, my opinions probably don't represent those of Commodore or its management or its engineers, but I think the world would be a better place if they did.