From: behrenss@hphalle6.informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Soenke Behrens)
Subject: Vulcan Gold vs. Turbo IDE
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 16:10:58 GMT
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL7]

Hello,

here's a text I got from SHH comparing Vulcans against their Turbo IDE
card. Enjoy.
========

----------------------------------
  Some hints from ///SHH SYSTEME
----------------------------------


Vulcan speed and Turbo IDE Card compatibility


If you are looking at speed, there are many different kind of Vulcan
Hard drives. They all have the same controller card which does no DMA
and therefore cannot be really fast like the Turbo IDE Card.

Here are the different Vulcans:

1)  the old 20 MB and 40 MB units which are equipped with poor
mechanisms. They have a data transfer rate of about 4.5 ... 5
msec/block and are formatted with interleave 7:1. They are not fully
compatible with today's IDE standard. Under PRODOS 8 they are really
slowpokes.

2)  the old 100 MB units which in many (not all) cases have built in a
fast interleave 1:1 drive which is not bad. Some 100 MB units have the
same poor type of drives like the 20 MB and 40 MB units. The good ones
probably have a Conner 105 MB drive which formerly was one of the first
"large" capacity hard disk. Good performance even under PRODOS 8. The
"good" 100 MB units are already fully compatible with today's IDE
standard.

3)  the new Vulcan Gold units as they come out of the stock. They
still have the original controller, but the firmware has a new
revision reflecting the specific needs of the new drive types they are
using. The new firmare supports a lot of IDE drives now, but it's
still limited to that number in a table that is held inside the
partition manager (the Turbo IDE Card supports ANY IDE drive! WOW!!).
In the firmware and in the GS/OS driver they did some optimization to
squeeze out the remaining microseconds that were wasted (good
performance even under PRODOS 8).
  These new Vulcan Gold units (they even have a "golden" case) are
equipped with really good drives with internal cache buffer. They are
fully compatible with the Turbo IDE Card. While doing the software
optimization, AE found that the old Vulcans can get some more speed
when equipped with the Vulcan Gold firmware. This is the next category
of Vulcan systems:

4) old Vulcans with Vulcan Gold firmware and Vulcan Gold GS/OS driver
(revisions 2.xx). If you're installing the upgrade, the new partition
manager probably reports that you can re-format your Vulcan with a
different interleave to get your system faster. Many Vulcans will get
no message (no optimization possible), some can be re-formatted from
7:1 to 5:1, which results in

  a)  no speed increase when a TWGS is disabled
  b)  in an speed increase from 4.7 msec/block to 3.5 msec/block
      when a TWGS is active. Same results with a ZIP GS.

  Some drives have already a speed of 3.5 msec/block, there is no
further improvement available. In this case the Vulcan Gold upgrade
makes no sense. Programmed I/O is limited to a resulting 140
KBytes/second with the old non-caching IDE hard drives.

5) the old 100 MB units with Vulcan Gold firmware and Vulcan Gold
GS/OS driver. These upgraded systems may have some more speed because
the GS/OS driver is optimized. The difference is about 220 KB/second
versus 170 KBytes/second. About same performance as the off-the-stock
Vulcan Gold. This is true as for the Conner mechanisms. For example,
the 100 MB from Western Digital is one of the slowpokes that will be
as fast (slow) as pointed out under 4).

(-- end of Vulcan versions listing --)

  All time measurements refer to ProSel-16, statistics on disk access
(a really invaluable utility). We consider this as the main criterion
when estimating hard disk speed on the Apple II. As our ads tell you,
the Turbo IDE card is capable of doing data transfers as fast as 0.8
msec/block (many drives get down to 0.7 msec/block), which is much
better than the best Vulcan Gold performance, even better than a
RamFAST SCSI system and far beyond the normal Vulcan's speed.

  Our advice is to spend that money for the Vulcan Gold upgrade (it's
a ROM, two disks (5.25" and 3.5") and one (!) sheet of paper for about
$45 or $50). Then try it and get disappointed, throw it into the trash
or sell it to somebody else who wants to be a proud (pseudo-) Vulcan
Gold owner.

Finally, you may have reached the point of prudence to know where you
can get true speed. Speed for interleave 1:1.


PS: We are working to get even these old incompatible Vulcan IDE
drives to function with the Turbo IDE Card.


Also have a look into the GEnie A2 library:

TURBO.IDE.BXY      a detailed description of the Turbo IDE Card
CHECK.VULCAN.BXY   check features of your Vulcan hard drive

Special christmas offer in december!

///SHH Systeme, Joachim Lange


-----------------  End of Vulcan hints  --------------------

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