mpe wrote on 2021-11-30, 20:20:

Storage controller stuff is complicated. IMHO if backed by solid state device (CF card) it doesn't really matter. Caching makes things slower actually. I don't believe there is a big difference between storage adapters.

Actually you know what? I made an edit to specify better the historical time of my interest (I already have S3 Trio, I know it's great, only it's already beyond the historical time relevant to my nostalgia) and I'll make a whole new thread about this...

One more question for you here if you can: SD cards.

I have already IDE to SD adapters and I found them great. I wonder about SCSI!
I have a great PCI controller... I can find more.... however, there are NO CONVERTERS whatsoever on the planet that go beyond 10 MB/sec SCSI! That v6 SCSI to SD adapter thingy is the best we've got.
Does it make sense to have excellent 40MB/sec or even 80MB/sec and 160MB/sec PCI SCSI controllers if then we gotta bottleneck them down to 10 MB/sec because of the adapter?

I know that the smooth sequential reading performance of solid state memories like SD cards still make them fly compared to spinning drives of the past.... but it makes me wonder if it's worth it to go down the SCSI route, when we can have an UATA 33 or 66 MB/sec (or even 133 MB/sec), with a non-bottlenecked ATA-to-SD adapter and put in there ultra fast SD cards... almost saturating their bandwidth....

aries-mu wrote on 2021-11-30, 20:39:

I have already IDE to SD adapters and I found them great. I wonder about SCSI!
I have a great PCI controller... I can find more.... however, there are NO CONVERTERS whatsoever on the planet that go beyond 10 MB/sec SCSI! That v6 SCSI to SD adapter thingy is the best we've got.
Does it make sense to have excellent 40MB/sec or even 80MB/sec and 160MB/sec PCI SCSI controllers if then we gotta bottleneck them down to 10 MB/sec because of the adapter?

No because v6 is narrow SCSI-2 device which peaks at 10MB/s. So pretty much any PCI/VLB/EISA SCSI adaptor is good enough. Unless it is caching one which tends to slow things down.

mpe wrote on 2021-11-30, 22:02:

No because v6 is narrow SCSI-2 device which peaks at 10MB/s. So pretty much any PCI/VLB/EISA SCSI adaptor is good enough. Unless it is caching one which tends to slow things down.

Gotcha. And does it make sense to have any SCSI controller as opposed to PIO MODE 4 EIDE or even UATA 33 or 66 or 133 with IDE-to-SD card? At this point, I suspect the latter would be much better than SCSI, am I correct?

I prefer working with SCSI as unlike IDE the adaptor has its own BIOS so that I can easily move my storage between different systems. Don't bother with BIOS disk configuration, all sorts of geometry translation issues, size limits, booting problems, etc. Just plug and boot. A kind of like XTIDE.

As I mostly deal with 386/486/early Pentium systems, 10MB/s sustained speed and especially <0.1ms access time is crazy fast. Magnitudes faster than any period correct hardware.

So UDMA33/66 or UW-SCSI isn't something I need.

mpe wrote on 2021-12-01, 20:24:

I prefer working with SCSI as unlike IDE the adaptor has its own BIOS so that I can easily move my storage between different systems. Don't bother with BIOS disk configuration, all sorts of geometry translation issues, size limits, booting problems, etc. Just plug and boot. A kind of like XTIDE.

As I mostly deal with 386/486/early Pentium systems, 10MB/s sustained speed and especially <0.1ms access time is crazy fast. Magnitudes faster than any period correct hardware.

So UDMA33/66 or UW-SCSI isn't something I need.

I understand.
Indeed, I care a lot about the hardware being "period correct", except for drives! I hate spinning drives and I actually love the idea of this PAST-FUTURE blend where the future is solid state drives of some kind and past is everything else, to make them insanely fast despite everything else being period-correct.
Which is why, although I agree with you that <0.1ms access time at 10MB/s is already insane compared to the crappy drives we had back then, UDMA 33/66 or UW-SCSI excite me even more 😀