@eric ,
@This Does Not Compute ,
@speakers
Thank you for your kind replies, and for the very helpful results.
For the record, I am using the
HD SC Setup (patched) 7.3.5 driver on all my virtual drives, which is the officially sanctioned driver in the vast majority of cases, as per
this BlueSCSI Performance page. And while that official page does mention the
OS 8 driver too, and while I have discussed minor performance benefits of that OS 8 driver with Eric in the past, my SE didn't work with the OS 8 driver, so I went back to 7.3.5. Even so, as Colin's video points out, if you use PPC, the 7.3.5 driver will work, but give you poor performance. Use his recommended FWB driver instead on PPC.
I would encourage everyone to verify what driver you are using. Just launch
SCSI Director Pro 4.0 and click on the View menu, then Device Information. If you are using something other than 7.3.5 on your BSv2 drive images with 68k Macs, your performance
could be adversely affected.
In reply to
Eric & Colin, MacBench 3.0's "Disk Mix" consists of Sequential Reads (512b, 1K, 32K, etc.), Random Reads, Sequential Writes and Radom Writes. I have no idea if one can interpret any of that to be or include "SEEK timing." But it doesn't sound like SEEK testing to me.
Separately from that, MacBench 3.0 also has a "Publishing Disk Mix" which does not specify what it is testing other than Photoshop & Quark Press files.
I've spent way too many hours on this, but I finally have some hard numbers, all done in my otherwise stock 16MHz SE/30 (fully recapped, non-stock power supply with rock solid voltages, brand new RAM & ROM sockets with metal tabs):
Compare your "score" numbers to mine.
The problem I originally had was two-fold. In my BSv2 INI file, I had DEBUG enabled on one of my two BSv2's. And on both of my BSv2's (I have two SD cards), all the drives were fragmented. In the above results, you can see the huge difference that disabling DEBUG and using a non-Fragmented drive makes, even on a stock 16MHz SE/30.
Oddly, even with DEBUG ON and with Fragmented drive images, SCSI Director Pro 4.0's scores were normal. Only MacBench was able to sleuth out the problem.
I knew there was a problem in the OVERALL FEEL of the machine. Booting from my MacSD felt fast and smooth, and when icons and filenames appeared for the first time at the Desktop (just after booting), they appeared very quickly. But my BSv2 drives booted noticeably more slowly, and I could then see each and every icon and file name appear in Finder windows, one at a time. So it cannot be argued that MacBench results are misleading or unimportant. I know what I felt in terms of speed.
NOTES:
- Q540S is a Quantum 540S spinner drive that is normal speed, and not unusually fast.
- DGHS is my IBM 4.5GB DGHS server drive which is fast.
- Frag = Fragmented
- Debug = Debug Mode Enabled
- No accelerators or PDS cards of any kind was installed at the time of testing.
- There was 16MB of motherboard RAM (1 bank) installed at the time of testing.
- Most testing was in System 7.1, but stupid MacBench 3 crashes for unknown reasons at times, forcing me to use System 7.6.1.
- I used a non-stock ROM which eliminates the need for Mode32 (to enable 32-bit addressing).
- I used a Gigastone V30 uSD card with Adapter in the above testing. GigaStone is commonly found on Amazon here in Japan and is also recommended by @Kay K.M.Mods (that's how I learned about those SD cards).
- I have a SanDisk Extreme V30 card in my other BSv2, but in my testing, I determined the two to be pretty much the same speed, mainly because both SD cards are fast with a V30 rating.
- I have spent countless hours testing in MacBench 3.0, and I can tell you that running the same multi-hour test twice in a row will yield results that are up to about 4% different. So if you get 100% one time, your very next test may show 104% or 96%. So I consider 4% the "margin of error."
- PCB revision of my two BSv2 units is 2022.12a, and both are running the newest v2024.04.02 firmware.
- Colin uses MacBench 2.0 in his video. I have always used MacBench 3.0, mainly because it is the newest MacBench which can run on an SE/30. However, there may be some merit to running version 2.0 if you wish to compare a Mac Portable's performance, because I version 2.0 is the last version to support the 68000 processor. Version 3 requires a Mac II or higher, System 7.0 or newer, and 8MB of RAM.
Fragmented drives are the bane of all SD card devices, from the FloppyEMU to BlueSCSI to MacSD. MacSD is smart though and will index fragments. FloppyEMU refuses to work at all. And BSv2 works silently, albeit more slowly, even with fragmented drives, and it is up to the user to check the log file.
Realistically speaking, I consider the following to be true for the vast majority of people:
- Most people never or hardly ever check log files and therefore have no idea if their drives are fragmented or not. Most probably are. And if people use Apple Silicon to erase the SD card and then copy image files onto it, I can nearly guarantee that everyone has fragmented drives.
- I can only get non-fragmented images onto the SD card with an Intel Mac, and even then it often takes more than one attempt in the case of my 2GB drive files. Why 2GB? Because that's the maximum System 6 can see, and I want to ensure that if I ever run System 6, that it won't avoid seeing some of my drives.
- If something is hard, most people won't do it. So I suspect most people won't accidental enable DEBUG. But at the same time, most people will use fragmented drives and they may wonder what impacts performance.
@speakers , open your *.ini file and verify if DEBUG is mentioned there and if it is, delete that line and save! You then need to erase your SD card (after first having made a backup to your modern Mac) via Disk Utility, formatting it ExFAT with Master Boot Record. If you then copy your backup files back to the SD with an Intel Mac, you then need to put the SD into your BSv2, boot your SE/30, Shutdown, put the SD back into your modern Mac and check the log. If you still have fragmentation, you can sometimes copy from your backup and overwrite the old file to get that stupid frag warning to vanish in the log, but not always. Sometimes, I have to reformat the card more than once when I have multiple large 2GB image files on the SD card. But be sure you copy the image files one at a time, not all files at once!
CONCLUSION:
Eliminating Debug Mode & disk image Fragmentation is necessary to maximize BSv2 performance, but even in that case and with a fast V30 SD card in BSv2, MacSD (even without a V-rated SD card at all) still trounces all other drives on the SE/30 in MacBench 3.0's Disk Mix, despite the fact that MacSD's hardware should "theoretically" be slower than BSv2.
I can provide my MacBench 3.0 results files to anyone who wishes to have them.
