ATTO Silicon Express IV Nubus

[lobust]

I have read some comments here and there suggesting the Silicon Express IV is not bootable.

I have just acquired one, and I can confirm that it IS in fact bootable, at least on a Quadra 800, which is the only Mac I have thus far tested it in.

The same rules apply as with the SE II - it will not find a bootable volume by itself, but if you boot by some other means and in the Startup Disk control panel select a bootable volume attached to the SEIV, it will happily boot from it. It lingered a while on the gray screen the first time, but subsequent boots were normal.

With a SCSI2SD v6 it is FAST. The only benchmark I had installed was Speedometer but it shows ~3x faster than onboard SCSI with the SCSI2SD. I will test with some better benchmarks in due course and I have a 10k ultra wide hard drive coming in the post to compare...

 

[retr01]

Hi @lobust!

Sorry for so long to respond. I noticed you were going to compare the 10k ultra-wide SCSI hard drive with the SCSI2SD you have. What did you find out?

 

[olePigeon]

I'd be curious to know if it can use removable media that has a sector size larger than 512 bytes. Such as 640MB and larger 3.5" magneto optical disks.

 

[Trash80toG4]

With a SCSI2SD v6 it is FAST. The only benchmark I had installed was Speedometer but it shows ~3x faster than onboard SCSI with the SCSI2SD. I will test with some better benchmarks in due course and I have a 10k ultra wide hard drive coming in the post to compare...

Cool stuff! If I had money to burn I'd do a RAID array of v6 in one of my StudioArrays on the JackHammer in my 81/110. Savvio SCA Ultras on Fast/Wide in the other one should mop the floor with Narrow SCSII SD I think?

I've got a first version Silicon Express card in the IIfx. Hope to one day get v6 for that. Wondering if the 5.25" HDDs that shipped in the IIfx used more or less power and produced more or less heat than the little SCA server drives?

Neat stuff, can't wait to see if you've had a chance to test really fast rust against v6.

 

[lobust]

I'd be curious to know if it can use removable media that has a sector size larger than 512 bytes. Such as 640MB and larger 3.5" magneto optical disks.

Unfortunately a MO drive is still on my wish list, and I have no other SCSI removable media to test with. I will try to keep it in mind though.

Hi @lobust!

Sorry for so long to respond. I noticed you were going to compare the 10k ultra-wide SCSI hard drive with the SCSI2SD you have. What did you find out?

Cool stuff! If I had money to burn I'd do a RAID array of v6 in one of my StudioArrays on the JackHammer in my 81/110. Savvio SCA Ultras on Fast/Wide in the other one should mop the floor with Narrow SCSII SD I think?

I've got a first version Silicon Express card in the IIfx. Hope to one day get v6 for that. Wondering if the 5.25" HDDs that shipped in the IIfx used more or less power and produced more or less heat than the little SCA server drives?

Neat stuff, can't wait to see if you've had a chance to test really fast rust against v6.

When I get around to this I will update, too many non-hobby projects right now though and a lot of my stuff is still in storage from a recent move...

Unfortunately my testing with the spinner so far has been limited to "yes, this works" and left at that...

 

[lobust]

Cool stuff! If I had money to burn I'd do a RAID array of v6 in one of my StudioArrays on the JackHammer in my 81/110. Savvio SCA Ultras on Fast/Wide in the other one should mop the floor with Narrow SCSII SD I think?

I've got a first version Silicon Express card in the IIfx. Hope to one day get v6 for that. Wondering if the 5.25" HDDs that shipped in the IIfx used more or less power and produced more or less heat than the little SCA server drives?

Neat stuff, can't wait to see if you've had a chance to test really fast rust against v6.

Just noticed you said "first version" - I have never seen one older than the SEII, could you maybe post some pictures of that one whenever you have it out next?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Dunno, was the SEII fast only? The IIfx is well and truly buried, but I may be able to get to it. Just looked, but the box wasn't where I thought it was.

 

[V.Yakob]

I apologize for raising this old topic, I just want to leave my experience here.
The other day I received the Atto SiliconExpress IV, which I planned to use in the PM8100.
The board works, it's bootable, however, I encountered a problem that I didn't think about from the beginning.



The board does not work properly if a NewerTech processor update is installed:
1. If the boot is performed from a disk connected to the SCSI bus on the motherboard, the OS boots without errors, but any time you try to copy the file to a disk connected to the SEIV, the machine freezes.
2. If you try to boot the OS from a disk connected to the SEIV, the freezes occur at different stages of boot. Sometimes immediately after loading the processor extension, sometimes an Error Bus is reported, sometimes it reaches the desktop. But in the end, it's always one - machine freezes.

If you start the system without expanding the NewerTech processor, the machine works fine.

I wonder if when using a Sonnet processor, the hang problem will also be reproduced, or will it work normally?
Does anyone know a way to make SCSI work with a processor update from NewerTech?
Why doesn't it work?

I did a disk subsystem speed test with QuickBench, and for some reason it works faster when the cache card is not installed.



What it looks like.








For the sake of a joke, I'm connecting an old 500 GB disk. And it works. However, I didn't format it, with an 80 Mhz processor... it's for a long time.

 

[lobust]

The board does not work properly if a NewerTech processor update is installed:
1. If the boot is performed from a disk connected to the SCSI bus on the motherboard, the OS boots without errors, but any time you try to copy the file to a disk connected to the SEIV, the machine freezes.
2. If you try to boot the OS from a disk connected to the SEIV, the freezes occur at different stages of boot. Sometimes immediately after loading the processor extension, sometimes an Error Bus is reported, sometimes it reaches the desktop. But in the end, it's always one - machine freezes.

If you start the system without expanding the NewerTech processor, the machine works fine.

I wonder if when using a Sonnet processor, the hang problem will also be reproduced, or will it work normally?
Does anyone know a way to make SCSI work with a processor update from NewerTech?
Why doesn't it work?

Something that I didn't mention in this thread, because I spoke about it in another thread around the same time, is that my Daystar Fastcache Quadra PDS cache card disables itself when the SEIV is installed in the system. It grays out the option to enable it in the Daystar control panel, so there is a deliberate check for the presence of this card which implies that there was some known issue between the SEIV and PDS cards on the 040 platform.

I was never able to find any documentation about this behaviour however.

I wonder if whatever incompatibility exists on the 040 also exists on the 601 platform?

 

[V.Yakob]

@lobust Yesterday I continued my experiments, and connected to SEIV BlueSCSIv2 through 50-pin, the reading speed was higher than when connecting an SSD through 68-pin and 2 adapters.
In this case, the cache card did not affect the performance of the disk system.



I think I'll buy a 50-pin to IDE SCSI adapter and measure the speed again.

Mac OS boot also freezes when using NewerTech G3 PDS CPU 300 Mhz update and SEIV.



I checked the SCSI 68-pin adapter -> IDE -> SATA -> SSD on MMD with PCI-X Adaptec-29160-MAC installed - the disk read speed was 89 MB/s.

 

[bakkus]

@lobust Yesterday I continued my experiments, and connected to SEIV BlueSCSIv2 through 50-pin, the reading speed was higher than when connecting an SSD through 68-pin and 2 adapters.
In this case, the cache card did not affect the performance of the disk system.

View attachment 16953

I think I'll buy a 50-pin to IDE SCSI adapter and measure the speed again.

Mac OS boot also freezes when using NewerTech G3 PDS CPU 300 Mhz update and SEIV.



I checked the SCSI 68-pin adapter -> IDE -> SATA -> SSD on MMD with PCI-X Adaptec-29160-MAC installed - the disk read speed was 89 MB/s.

Wow, looks like you're pretty much saturating the SCSI and/or Nubus bus there. For both read and write.
Also be aware that flash memory isn't particularly strong on long sequential writes - it's the near-instant seek times which makes everything snappy.

Thanks for publishing these results!

 

[trag]

My ancient (wetware) memory says that when the NuBus G3 upgrades came out, the SEIV was the only SCSI card compatible with them. NewerTech was the only seller for a long while. Later they got it working with the JackHammer as well.

If my memory is accurate, then you shouldn't be having the problems you are unless, perhaps you have a very early version of the NewerTech card before they solved the incompatibility.

Is there an option in the SEIV control panel to turn on/off loading of SCSI Manager? The JackHammer has that option, but it may be one of those hidden options that requires holding down a key to see it. Do you have a copy of SCSI Manager in your extensions folder? On an 8100 you probably want both of these turned off, as there's a copy in the 8100 ROMs and having multiple copies active could cause problems similar to what you're seeing.

There was a lot of discussion about this on XLR8yourmac.com back in the day, but I doubt that stuff is still available. Maybe the archives of the front page go back that far.

It's also possible that I have the JackHammer and the SEIV reversed in terms of which got compatibility first. Old old memory...

After NewerTech shut down Sonnet hired some of their engineers.

 

[V.Yakob]

@trag, I think I found similar reports about the problem, and it seems they haven't been solved.
There may be newer revisions of the processor update where this problem is solved.

Link1, Link2