Adding hard disks to your AmigaOS 4 computer is not always that easy, finding the proper card with a supported chipset, that can be used out of the box. RaBbit Hole Computing created a new card that, I believe, can be quite useful for us. That's why I decided to buy one, and test it on two systems of mine. This review is not a paid one by Rabbit Hole Computing, and in no way I am affiliated. Buying one should be your decision, based on your needs.
So, what is all about this card. This PCI card uses the well-known Silicon Image SiI3112, which has been supported in AmigaOS 4 for many years. That only made me confident that the card would work perfectly on my microAmigaOne or my AmigaOne X5000. The SiI3112 can usually be found in other PCI cards that provide 2 SATA connections, which is perfect to expand the number of hard disks your system can get. But the card I am presenting you today is a little bit different.
This card has an M.2 SATA connector where you can put a module there of different sizes and capacities. Furthermore, it has one 2.5" SATA+Power connector, to connect any SSD or hard disk, with holes to screw it on the board. These capabilities help to use the space of the card to hold two hard disks, without needing more area inside your case. Of course, if you need to connect a bigger hard disk, like a 3.5" one, it is better to use a converter, like the one below, and a couple of cables.
The card comes with a 256GB M.2 SSD already attached and ready to be used. I thought to test it first on my microAmigaOne, just because it was easier for me to open and install it. It would be interesting to see if its quaintness motherboard would use it without issues. Although the case is a little bit tight, the card fit just fine and it looked great. And most importantly, it worked great, after I enabled it in the uboot of the system.
So, the only thing that I had to do was to set it up and create a few partitions. So, I started the MediaToolBox and the card was already available.
Here is the available M.2 SSD disk, which needs to be initialised, before we can create any partition.
Reading the SSD configuration worked fine, recognising it correctly. Clicking on the changes' acceptance, will lead us to the next step to create the partitions.
I created three partitions, although only the first two will be used for some benchmarking. As you can see, the first one is set to SFS v1.290, and the other two to FFS/07 v53.2.
After the necessary reboots and formattings, the partitions were ready to be tested. For that, I chose to use DiskSpeed v4.3, as this can be found on Aminet. DiskSpeed can test the speed of a hard disk partition, but this is not a raw test. That means that is influenced a lot of the installed filesystem. So, between the SDH0 and SDH1, the two new partitions I created, I expect to see differences in performance.
I will also test it against the internal hard disk that is connected to the IDE connection of the motherboard. This is a mSATA Mini SATA SSD, converted to 2.5 Inch IDE 44-Pin with an enclosure case. Although that it is set to work on UDMA 3, I expect its performance to be lower than the PCI SATA card. This is the only device that works reliable on my microAmigaOne.
So now it is time to have some results from DiskSpeed. First will test the internal DH0 which uses SFS and is connected to the IDE connector of the system.
> DiskSpeed DRIVE=DH0: ALL
DiskSpeed 4.3, OS4 version
Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development
Copyright © 2003-04 Daniel J. Andrea II & Stéphane Guillard
------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 68020 AmigaOS Version: 54.61 Normal Video DMA
Device: DH0: Buffers: 600
Testing directory manipulation speed.
File Create: 4566 files/sec
File Open: 22042 files/sec
Directory Scan: 99656 files/sec
File Delete: 6240 files/sec
Seek/Read: 59940 seeks/sec
Testing with a 512 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 8289344 bytes/sec
Write to file: 34001719 bytes/sec
Read from file: 72375104 bytes/sec
Testing with a 4096 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 16613888 bytes/sec
Write to file: 151553536 bytes/sec
Read from file: 139309568 bytes/sec
Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 21684224 bytes/sec
Write to file: 301068288 bytes/sec
Read from file: 173346816 bytes/sec
Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 20873216 bytes/sec
Write to file: 23330816 bytes/sec
Read from file: 23396352 bytes/secNext, let's run the tests on the M.2 SSD formatted to SFS
> DiskSpeed DRIVE=SDH0: ALL
DiskSpeed 4.3, OS4 version
Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development
Copyright © 2003-04 Daniel J. Andrea II & Stéphane Guillard
------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 68020 AmigaOS Version: 54.61 Normal Video DMA
Device: SDH0: Buffers: 600
Testing directory manipulation speed.
File Create: 6862 files/sec
File Open: 28839 files/sec
Directory Scan: 196554 files/sec
File Delete: 9961 files/sec
Seek/Read: 129678 seeks/sec
Testing with a 512 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 12155840 bytes/sec
Write to file: 35310104 bytes/sec
Read from file: 72448512 bytes/sec
Testing with a 4096 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 26477056 bytes/sec
Write to file: 213748736 bytes/sec
Read from file: 145764352 bytes/sec
Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 32116736 bytes/sec
Write to file: 382500864 bytes/sec
Read from file: 225857536 bytes/sec
Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 32964608 bytes/sec
Write to file: 44171264 bytes/sec
Read from file: 42041344 bytes/secAnd then the M.2 SSD formatted with the FFS
> DiskSpeed DRIVE=SDH1: ALL
DiskSpeed 4.3, OS4 version
Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development
Copyright © 2003-04 Daniel J. Andrea II & Stéphane Guillard
------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 68020 AmigaOS Version: 54.61 Normal Video DMA
Device: SDH1: Buffers: 600
Testing directory manipulation speed.
File Create: 153 files/sec
File Open: 11804 files/sec
Directory Scan: 63428 files/sec
File Delete: 55 files/sec
Seek/Read: 25676 seeks/sec
Testing with a 512 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 1420864 bytes/sec
Write to file: 3601600 bytes/sec
Read from file: 3987136 bytes/sec
Testing with a 4096 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 14448128 bytes/sec
Write to file: 17992704 bytes/sec
Read from file: 14782976 bytes/sec
Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 23375872 bytes/sec
Write to file: 35463168 bytes/sec
Read from file: 35172352 bytes/sec
Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 25296896 bytes/sec
Write to file: 39845888 bytes/sec
Read from file: 41156608 bytes/secWhat can we understand by these results? Maybe we could say:
- The M.2 SSD on the PCI card seems much faster than the mSATA SSD on the IDE. For example, the file creation is 6862 files/sec on the M.2 against 4566 files/sec on the mSATA. But the directory scan difference is almost doubled, 196554 files/sec on the M.2 against 99656 files/sec on the mSATA.
- All the metrics are much better for the M.2 SSD against the mSATA, but some of them are pretty close, like reading from files, especially with the 512 bytes files. Only when we get to files bigger than 32768 bytes the difference is much bigger.
- The M.2 SSD partition that is formatted with FFS is much slower than the mSATA SSD on the IDE connector. Although, the metrics that have to do with files equal or bigger than 4096 bytes look close or even better.
Some of the metrics might also be influenced by the CPU speed. My microAmigaOne is using an 800MHz G3, which is not enough for a few tasks. So, let's move the card to my AmigaOne X5000 and see if we can see any difference in performance.
Here is the DiskSpeed results of the same SFS partition on the M.2 SSD on the PCI card. The device name changed to SIDH0 to avoid some conflicts.
> DiskSpeed DRIVE=SIDH0: ALL
DiskSpeed 4.3, OS4 version
Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development
Copyright © 2003-04 Daniel J. Andrea II & Stéphane Guillard
------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 68020 AmigaOS Version: 54.57 Normal Video DMA
Device: SIDH0: Buffers: 600
Testing directory manipulation speed.
File Create: 14677 files/sec
File Open: 62721 files/sec
Directory Scan: 513545 files/sec
File Delete: 21034 files/sec
Seek/Read: 354943 seeks/sec
Testing with a 512 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 24746304 bytes/sec
Write to file: 98595188 bytes/sec
Read from file: 236406528 bytes/sec
Testing with a 4096 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 50752512 bytes/sec
Write to file: 94405120 bytes/sec
Read from file: 179620352 bytes/sec
Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 58126336 bytes/sec
Write to file: 365285376 bytes/sec
Read from file: 363687936 bytes/sec
Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Create file: 70844416 bytes/sec
Write to file: 86474752 bytes/sec
Read from file: 52068352 bytes/secIf you compare the results with the ones from the microAmigaOne above, the SSD hard disk speeds doubled or even tripled in some cases. In the table below, you can see the basic test information compared between the two systems, as well as the X5000 SSD connected to the onboard SATA connector.
| microAmigaOne | X5000 M.2 SSD PCI |
|
|
| X5000 SSD onboard SATA |
|
All these tests may not be 100% accurate, but at least they give a clear idea of how much faster is having an SSD connected to the PCI of your system. Especially for the microAmigaOne, the speed increase will be tremendous, having the system being more responsive on intensive hard disk jobs.
The card can be ordered from Rabbit Hole Computing, and it comes with the 256GB M.2 drive. Unfortunately, there is no reseller in Europe that sells these cards. So I had to pay half of its cost to customs. Have that in mind if you are in Europe like me.
I will really enjoy the card, and I hope you will find it useful for your system as well.