Turbo IDE Hard Disk Controller
By Joachim Lange
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
SHH SYSTEME
The Turbo IDE Card is a High-Speed DMA Hard Disk Controller for the Apple IIGS and Apple IIe which allows the use of the inexpensive and popular IDE hard drives with Apple II computers.
Features:
- Fully PRODOS and GS/OS compatible.
- Uses High-Speed DMA in Apple IIGS and Apple IIe.
- Offers highest data transfer rate: as low as 0.8 msec/Block for linear read (using ProSel-16, Statistics on Disc Access). Many large-capacity drives offer even higher speed.
- Speed test: A real-world GS/OS-verify delivers more than 600 KBytes/s.
- Up to 300 KBytes/s data transfer rate under PRODOS 8.
- Boots a minimum GS/OS System in nine seconds, with accelerator in six seconds.
- Boots PRODOS 8 in less than one second.
- Wastes no time for self-initialisation compared to standard SCSI interfaces! Gives a very short warm-up time.
- High-speed GS/OS driver with GS/OS-caching support included (Note: RAMFast SCSI controllers do not support GS/OS caching).
- Fully compatible with all DMA-capable hardware such as: ZIP GSX, Transwarp GS, PC Transporter, RAM Cards from Apple, Applied Engineering, CV-Tech, Harris, Q-Labs etc.
- Supports two drives up to 256 MBytes capacity each.
- Up to eight partitions on one drive, 16 partitions on two drives, 32 MBytes per partition (up to 256 MBytes if used with Macintosh HFS FSTs).
- Can boot from any partition (OA-1 .. OA-9, OA-A, OA-B, .. or by default)
- The DMA feature can be disabled by software to be compatible with non-DMA-capable hardware as the ZIP Chip, the Original Transwarp and some IIGS memory expansion cards.
- The Turbo IDE Card supports 8 (eight) MBytes of RAM expansion on the IIGS.
- Under PRODOS 8, the upper partitions (3...8) can be mapped into other slots.
- Semi-automatic installation procedure with auto-recognition of the hard drive's geometry and with auto-partitioning.
- All types of IDE hard disk drives can be used. There are no restrictions in the number of sectors per track, number of heads or number of cylinders. The Turbo IDE Card Software supports any combination of numbers that may exist.
- Hard disk cable included (other controllers need an extra cable).
- One year warranty.
Vulcan & Vulcan Gold Controller Replacement
The Turbo IDE Card is the ultimate Speedup Kit for Vulcan Hard Drives. It doubles the speed of the fastest Vulcan Gold configuration.
Indeed, using the Turbo IDE Card, your Vulcan will be RAMFast without ever buying a RamFAST SCSI Card.
The Turbo IDE Card is *** fully pin-compatible *** with Vulcan hard drives. A Vulcan user can easily switch over to the Turbo IDE Card and has the option of upgrading his system with a second hard drive (external). You even could replace your old, low capacity drive in your Vulcan case with an up-to-date, 120 or 200 MB drive and really save a lot of money.
Note 1: Some of the older 20 MB and 40 MB Vulcan drives are not fully compatible with the IDE standard. Contact AE about the drive type they have built in. The Turbo IDE Card requires full compatibility with the IDE standard.
Note 2: In InCider 7/92, p. 40, you can get some speed test results for Vulcan Gold, ZipDrive, ECON PEGASUS and TMS SHADOW. Well, just have a look at the "Linear Read" and "GS/OS Verify"... These are the numbers that really count!
Here are some test results for the Turbo IDE Card (Apple IIGS at 2.8 MHz, GS/OS System 6.0, using ProSel-16, Statistics on Disc Access, Linear Read) connected to
Seagate ST3102: 0.8 msec/block
Seagate ST3120: 0.8 msec/block
Seagate ST3144: 0.8 msec/block
Seagate ST3283: 0.75 msec/block
Conner CP 3004: 1.1 msec/block (Vulcan Gold 40)
Conner CP 30084: 0.91 msec/block
Conner CP 30104: 0.79 msec/block
Conner CP 30204: 0.75 msec/block
Turbo IDE Card - Technical Details
- The built-in DMA sequencer transfers 512 bytes of data in one burst. One block of 512 bytes is transferred in 512 microseconds without any overhead. This is the maximum I/O speed available in Apple II computers. The Turbo IDE Card has no need for an extra 10 MHz processor to make hard drives RamFAST.
- The DMA is very efficient and easy to program, simply by reading or writing five 8-bit-registers (DMA bank, DMA address low/high, DMA read/write mode and DMA start).
- The DMA channel can alternatively be accessed through a 16-bit data port for non-DMA-modes and diagnostic purposes.
- All IDE task file registers are available in the Apple slot I/O area.
- Four banks of 2 KBytes firmware EPROM and four banks of 512 bytes scratch RAM are available.
- The Turbo IDE Card was developed according to Apple's Interface Card Design and DMA Design Guidelines.
- The Turbo IDE Card firmware supports the PRODOS 8 and the SmartPort protocol (standard & extended calls) and is well
speed-optimized. As a result, the boot time for launching GS/OS is only two seconds longer when the GS/OS driver is not installed.
- As mentioned before, the Turbo IDE Card software supports any number of sectors per track, number of heads and number of cylinders. At this time, the math routines (they have to do a lot of dividing) are limited to a reasonable 256 MBytes per drive. The fast math routines are working universally in the range of the values allowed in the IDE task file (17...254 sectors, 2...16 heads and up to 65535 cylinders). Most IDE drives are limited to 50...60 sectors, 16 heads and 1024 cylinders.
- Support for Universal Translation Mode: The installation program will set the hard disk(s) to any Translation Mode at user's request. This may be useful for some fine-tuning.
- The Turbo IDE Card will support upcoming tape streamers for the IDE interface.
- RamFAST SCSI Cards do not support GS/OS caching! Turbo IDE Cards do!
There is still a big advantage compared with a caching SCSI card. When copying a large quantity of files to a hard disk partition, the Turbo IDE Card (supporting GS/OS caching) is very, very fast. A caching SCSI card, which does not support GS/OS caching, "looses" the directory and index blocks in its cache because the cache is never large enough to hold all data, or the directory contents in the SCSI cache are overwritten by the actual data (cache splitting required). So the SCSI card has to re-read some directory blocks from hard disk whenever they are requested by GS/OS. This results in a remarkable slow-down in overall speed because of the many seeks that have to be done. You can hear the noise of the SCSI drive when it is moving its read/write heads permanently. The problem of "loosing" directory blocks in the cache is really annoying when a hard disk partition gets filled up more and more. A nearly empty partition never shows this problem.
By contrast, GS/OS running with the Turbo IDE Card has most directory and index blocks available in the GS/OS cache at any time without the need to do hard drive accesses.
Ordering Information
The Turbo IDE Card is immediately available.
It carries a one year limited warranty against defects in materials and workmanship.
The Turbo IDE Card package consists of the controller, an IDE cable, the installation disk with GS/OS driver, and the manual.
The single-order price is US$150 plus US$25 for shipping and handling. Shipping is via standard air mail.
Quantity price each shipping
3 $140 $30
5 $135 $30
10 $130 $40
All orders must be prepaid in US currency (bills, checks and international remittances accepted). Please specify computer (IIe or IIGS). Dealer inquiries welcome.
SHH SYSTEME
Dipl. Ing. Joachim Lange
Schoenstrasse 80a
8000 Muenchen 90
Germany
Phone: (international)+ 49+ 89+ 6515150

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