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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Sun Jun 24, 2018 8:28 pm

I have an A3000 tower that had a Warp Engine 040/40 mhz and when I hooked it up I noticed how much more responsive that was then my A4000 with a Commodore A3640 board and 16 mb RAM - so I made the switch. The Warp Engine is the version designed for the A3000 - only two RAM sockets instead of 4 in the A4000 version, but it works just great! I would say it feels like it is running three times faster - everything from the video, to the hard drive and opening icons just feels like a new machine. I read the manual on the Warp Engine, and it seems like a lot of the speed up comes from the way it address's RAM - just tons faster than the A4000 RAM.
I was going to switch over to booting from the SCSI connector on the card, but I hesitate to lose the versatility of booting from a 16 Gig CF card - which now reports data transfers of 2.9 Mbs as opposed to the old 1.4 Mbs. I could put a SCSI drive in as a secondary drive - but why? 16 gigs is overkill as it is.

The Warp Engine has a 32 and a 16 mb chip - next I will replace that 16 mb chip with another 32!

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jun 24, 2018 10:45 pm

Wow that thing is a beast!

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A10001986
1986

Posted Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:10 am

The 3640 is the worst "accelerator" in Amiga history. No RAM, crappy design all over, mechanically impossible to fit into the A3000 with a proper fan, which the 40 desperately needs.

I, too, kicked it out, in my case in favor of a CS Mk2 with a 50Mhz 68060. It's like day and night. Congrats on the Warp Engine, a really cool gadget indeed.

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:13 pm

New update on my A4000 machine - it works great with the Warp Engine with 32 MB RAM and my 16 GB CF card - but it will not reboot. It just loses the drive on any reboot whatsoever. I can cold start it and it comes right up, but no reboot love. I have tried about four versions of SCSI.device and they all work the same. Bummer.

Soooo... It got me thinking about the SCSI on my Warp Engine. And I remembered that I had some SCSI drives from a customers old retired server, so I dug them out of storage.

Flippin Seagate Cheetah drives - 70 GB, 15,000 RPM! Talk about overkill! I was not sure the Amiga could even handle them. I found a nice converter from the 50 pin SCSI to 68 pin, and HDToolbox saw it straight away!
4 Gig Workbench partition, and then two 30+ gig secondary and tertiary partitions... And this thing FLIES! SYSINFO reliably tells me it is running over 9 Mbs - compared to 2.4 Mbs on my CF card.
It even reboots just fine now. Only two problems... On a cold boot it appears to spin up to slow and won't start. I have to do the old two finger mouse boot and tell it to boot from WDH0: - then it comes up fine. I will have to look into a solution on that one, but I am so happy I can actually reboot again!
Second problem - this drive gets HOT! Like so hot you I can't put a finger on it for more than a second. I have to find a way to cool it down inside the cramped little A4000 case.
Attachments
IMG_20180716_210703.jpg
IMG_20180716_210741.jpg
IMG_20180716_210625.jpg

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jul 16, 2018 10:38 pm

70 GB
Good god that's massive!

How long does it take to seek out and read the HDD on a cold boot-up?

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Mon Jul 16, 2018 11:28 pm

Not too bad. The extra spin up time on the drive adds about 10 seconds. It is OS 3.9, so Setpatch slows the boot horribly. From power on to play time is maybe 35 - 45 seconds. With OS 3.1 it would be like 10 or 15 seconds.
I fixed the cold boot. I jumpered the Warp Engine for 10 second delay - no difference. Set it back to no delay like it was - boots perfect every time. It makes zero sense, but it apparently worked.

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A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:20 am

I threw out all real harddrives and replaced them with SSDs with a SCSI-converter. Quiet, cool, --- slightly expensive though (the converters, that is). Power-on to ready-to-play on A3000 approx 10 secs (incl the SetPatch reboot).

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Tue Jul 17, 2018 8:15 am

I would suspect the SSD's are a bit cooler than my 15,000 RPM monster! I could fry an egg on that sucker. There is no way I can put it in the case. I ended up routing the SCSI and power cables out the back of the case and setting a 80mm cooling fan on top of the drive ( which is now outside the Amiga)
I have to dig out an old external drive case and modify it to hold my new oven... Errr.... Hard drive.

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A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:33 pm

Speaking of heat, ever thought about throwing out that pesky 68040 and replace it by a 060? I suppose you have an XC68040 on that Warp Engine, these are especially bad. The 040s got better (ie cooler) with the MC line, and even more so with the L88M or K63H masks, but all of them require fans. The 060 does not, a passive cooler is enough.

Adapters are available on Amibay, but watch out, some people developed a habit of massively overpricing these things. Yes, talking about Denmark.

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Dynamic_Computing

Posted Tue Jul 24, 2018 3:32 pm

I found a nice drive bay for my SCSI drive - I had a Falcon Drive Bay, kind of a big beast, but had it's own cooling fan and space for two hard drives. It was already configured for 68 pin SCSI, so I was good to go! I put another cooling fan in front of the bay just because the drive got so hot. It got me thinking... Why not put a second drive in there, just because I have room? The next drive I tried from that old server would not spin up, so I pulled another one out and tossed it in. Oh my goodness, it was a 300 Gig 15,000 RPM SCSI drive! Yikes!
The Amiga recognized it straight away in HD Toolbox, but refused to format it. (Not a DOS Disk). I tried FFS and PFS and neither worked. Today I downloaded SFS, an lo and behold, it formatted just great! I divided it into three 93+ Gig partitions since I still had to deal with the 128 Gig Partition limit.
Now... What on earth am I going to do with almost 400 Gigs of drive space on my A4000? I have no idea. I think I could install every bit of software ever created for the Amiga and have room to spare!
I will post a few pics later of this bad boy, both without and with the cover on the Falcon drive bay.
Next project - Getting my Video Toaster 4000 card to work. No clue what to do with it... And something tells me one of my old Amiga's I had picked up had a Toaster Flyer card - Now that would be useful with these huge drives! Time to dig through storage...
Attachments
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Falcon2.jpg
Falcon1.jpg
Last edited by Dynamic_Computing on Tue Jul 24, 2018 7:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.





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