Booting with maximum speed

[uweseimet]

In order to boot as fast as possible, follow these guidelines:

- Disable any device ID that you do not need. Checking for devices that are not connected slows down the boot process. HDDRUTIL's "Auto Configuring" function can be helpful here.
- SCSI/ACSI only: Disable any LUN that you do not need. Even disabling all LUNs can be a valid configuration. In this case HDDRIVER ignores all LUNs of a device, but they are still accessible with the integrated SCSI Driver.
- Remove FOLDRxxx, CACHExxx, JARxxx, POOLFIX3 and SCSIDRV from your AUTO folder. The functionality of these programs is already included in HDDRIVER and can be configured with HDDRUTIL, in particular with the "Basic Settings".
- If you are using a boot selector, verify whether you really need it. With HDDDRIVER you can boot from any partition by just pressing a key, which gives you a set of easily selectable boot configurations. In order to load ACCs from a different drive than C:, TOS requires that there are no ACCs at all on C:. With HDDRIVER you can configure any other drive to be your default boot drive, so that it does not matter if there are no ACCs on C:.

[uweseimet]

There is one setting that was missing in the previous list and can make the boot process faster, depending on your hardware.

- On a TT with TT-RAM and IDE hardware (Thunder IDE interface), configure HDDRIVER to be loaded into TT-RAM during the boot process. This will make your system slightly faster in general, because the HDDRIVER code and the GEMDOS caches will be located in TT-RAM, but especially IDE transfers will speed up considerably. The respective setting is located in "File->Preferences" in HDDRUTIL. Remember to re-install HDDRIVER after changing this setting, and also consult the HDDRIVER manual. Note that booting HDDRIVER into TT-RAM does not work if you are booting from the ACSI bus. But with a TT, as far as possible the more powerful SCSI bus should be used instead of ACSI anyway.

[fujiyama]

Could this also be applied to a normal ST with a MonSTer board (which has both IDE and 8 MB ALT-RAM)?

https://www.atarikit.co.uk/monster/monster.html

https://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t ... it=monster

[uweseimet]

No, booting HDDRIVER into TT-RAM only works with a TT. As far as I know it also works with the Milan, but I don't know whether in this case there is any IDE transfer speed gain.
The reason why IDE transfers profit is that they are not done by DMA (Ataris only support DMA for SCSI and ACSI) but by the CPU. When HDDRIVER is running in TT-RAM, it is running faster (like any other program that uses TT-RAM instead of ST-RAM), and therefore the CPU can transfer the data faster.

Even if you could boot HDDRIVER into the MonSTer's alternate RAM, it would only be faster if accessing this alternate RAM was faster than accessing the regular RAM. I guess there is no difference in speed. And, as far as I know, you need to explicitly add the alternate RAM (i.e. to tell TOS about it) with a program for the AUTO folder. But this is too late, because at the time the AUTO folder is scanned a bootable hard disk driver has already been launched. It might be possible to add the alternate RAM with a HDDRIVER module instead of a program for the AUTO folder, though.

[fujiyama]

No, booting HDDRIVER into TT-RAM only works with a TT.

Ah, OK. Too bad.
Actually it's not that big of a deal for me personally; HDDriver is very fast to begin with compared with the other options out there, and using a CF memory card as a hard drive is the dream come true which I wish was possible back in the 80s/90s when I was using hard drives that sounded like a jet plane taking off, and of course much slower as well!

And, as far as I know, you need to explicitly add the alternate RAM (i.e. to tell TOS about it) with a program for the AUTO folder. But this is too late, because at the time the AUTO folder is scanned a bootable hard disk driver has already been launched.

I understand.
As far as I remember you use a special utility for setting the "ALT-RAM" flag of the program you want loaded into that memory, but of course that won't help here.

It might be possible to add the alternate RAM with a HDDRIVER module instead of a program for the AUTO folder, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by a module. Is this related to the latest version of HDdriver? I'm a few versions behind as far as I remember.

[uweseimet]

As far as I remember you use a special utility for setting the "ALT-RAM" flag of the program you want loaded into that memory, but of course that won't help here.

That's not what I was refering to. You have to set the Alternate RAM flags (there are two) in the program header with any program that should run in or use alternate RAM, also with a TT. This is a feature of TOS, not of any memory expansion, and it does not really require a special utility. Most desktops also support this.
What I meant is that you probably need to run a program in the AUTO folder to tell TOS that there is any alternate memory at all, because TOS does not necessarily (like with a TT) detect the RAM during the memory test. Only RAM that is automatically detected by TOS is available at the time a hard disk driver is booted. This program would have to be run as module in order to tell TOS about the alternate RAM *before* TOS bootstraps the driver.
But as already mentioned, in order to really profiit in terms of speed, the additional RAM has to be faster than the regular RAM.

I'm not sure what you mean by a module. Is this related to the latest version of HDdriver? I'm a few versions behind as far as I remember.

Modules are supported since HDDRIVER 11. See https://www.hddriver.net/en/changes.html for an overview on changes in older versions, or https://www.hddriver.net/en/news.html for the latest changes. The announcements in the forum list the changes for each version in detail.
There is a detailed description on modules on the HDDRIVER website also also (for developers) on GitHub.

[fujiyama]

Thanks for clearing up the confusion.
I haven't used the ALT-RAM feature of the MonSTer much, so I'll look into that again.
Since I have a license for HDdriver 11.14 I should be good to go regards to modules.

Thanks again for creating and supporting HDdriver!