IDE speed Hddriver 11.xx vs 12.00

[Greenious]

Hello,

after upgrading to hddriver 12, I have slower ide transfer on my F030.

Tested with xferrate I get these numbers:
Test 11.06 > 2520 kb/s IDE
Test 11.14 > 2540 kb/s IDE
Test 12.00 > 22xx kb/s IDE

Settings:
Performance: Blitter enabled
Using a Kingspec 8gb DOM

Version 12 is about 300kb/sec slower, is this by design, or something you will correct in the next update?

[uweseimet]

Hi,

There was only one change related to IDE transfers with the blitter enabled since HDDRIVER 11.14: HDDRIVER 12 only uses the blitter if no odd memory address is involved in the transfer, otherwise transfers are done without the blitter. Transfers from/to odd addresses are extremely rare, does XFERRATE really use odd addresses?

Are the partition sizes (actually the sector sizes) of the partitions you are running XFERRATE for the same? Your results look to me as if you are running XFERRATE on different partition sizes or a different partition layout (TOS vs. DOS/Windows) when you are testing HDDRIVER 11 vs. HDDRIVER 12.

You should also check whether using the blitter on your Falcon provides any benefit at all. The faster the processor, the less you profit from the blitter when it is about IDE data transfers. WIth an ST, where the processor is considerably slower than with a Falcon, the performance improvement by the blitter is obvious, but for a Falcon you may be better off without the blitter, because the processor may move the IDE data faster than the blitter.

[Greenious]

The Falcon is a standard F030, clockpatch applied.
The DOM is divided in 8 1gb partitions, TOS/Windows compatibility checked.

The only difference is hddriver version.

Transferrate tested with xferrate v1.2

And I tried again, this time I got different results, I'm unsure why, I'm sure I had blitter enabled in my first test, but now I am not that sure anymore. lol

Anyway, the results

HDDriver 11.14:
Blitter Off: 2250 kb/s
Blitter On: 2540 kb/s

Here blitter gives a decent 300 kb/s boost.

HDDriver 12.00:
Blitter Off: 2220 kb/s
Blitter On: 2440 kb/s

Faster than my first test, but still slightly slower than v11. Not that it really matters much, I was just curious as to why, if it's by design (stability) or some other reason that might get improved.

[uweseimet]

I'm afraid I cannot correlate the difference of 100 kb/s with changes in HDDRIVER 12. In gneeral, when running XFERRATE several times the results of each run often differ, but the difference is usually less than 100 kb/s.

Have you already tried whether enabling the "Accelerated Mode" setting for your drive results in even more throughput? This is not related to the blitter, and depending on the IDE/SATA drive it can make quite a difference.

[uweseimet]

While reviewing/cleaning up the forum I stumbled upon this posting.

Note that due to optimizations IDE with HDDRIVER 12.6 is usually a bit faster than with HDDRIVER 12.0. Since you already appear to have a HDDRIVER 12 license you can simply upgrade, if you have not already done so.
Depending on the hardware, the speed gain is not dramatic, but it's usually clearly measurable. Ensure that you enable the IDE-related optimizations with "Performance" (HDDRUTIL). With my stock Falcon the highest transfer rate I have measured with XFERRATE is almost 2.7 MiB/s, without blitter support.

Note that IDE speed may differ between different HDDRIVER releases, in particular when new hardware is supported or because there were other changes related to support some hardware better. But support for more hardware does not necessarily mean something gets slower. HDDRIVER 12.6 supports the SD slots of the ATW800/2 as a new feature, but is nevertheless a bit faster then previous versions.

A future release, which is currently in the test phase, will very likely provide a quite significant speed increase with some existing IDE hardware for the Falcon. Stay tuned ;-).