Re: Multia & IDE
On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 12:16:46PM +0200, Michael Neuffer wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Jay Estabrook wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 23, 2000 at 12:39:26PM +0200, Michael Neuffer wrote:
> > > Does anybody know wether it is somehow possible to use
> > > the build in IDE interface of the UDB (Multia) in DMA mode ?
> >
> > I don't know for sure, but I expect that the SIO chip used on UDB is
> > pre-DMA, or perhaps never had a driver written for it, which has been
> > the case with a number of the SIO chips we (DEC/COMPAQ) used over the
> > years... :-\
>
> Thanks for the info Jay. This is really a pitty.
>
> I still use my good old Multia as my primary server at home
> and added a 12GB IDE disk some time ago to it to replace the old
> 0.5GB internal SCSI disk that was having problems.
>
> The new disk works fine, it is just that the disk transfers are horribly
> slow and basically eats up all of the few CPU cycles that the poor machine
> has while doing IO to the IDE disk......
It's possible that somebody hacked something up, but I kinda doubt it.
You could look at the chip involved (I think it's an INTEL SuperIO chip,
or perhaps the ISA bridge itself), and see what it's capable of, then
check the IDE driver docs in the kernels.
Most folks found a way to hook up an external SCSI box, which, even
though only FAST-10, was a whole lot better than the IDE...
--Jay++
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Jay A Estabrook Alpha Engineering - LINUX Project
Compaq Computer Corp. - MRO1-2/K20 (508) 467-2080
200 Forest Street, Marlboro MA 01752 Jay.Estabrook@compaq.com
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