Pegasos2 hardware upgrades.

@All

Want to share some stuff I do lately, and what want to do (so maybe some of you may give some advice).

Firstly what I do:

As it's known, old Pegasos2 boards have just an IDE. And Pegasos2 of course didn't support SATA directly, so I had to use both IDE-ports IDE<->Sata controllers sitting right in the IDE slots of motherboards, and so i use SSD for HDD and classic SATA cd-drive for booting and installing the OS. There a few pics (click on them for full size):

Those IDE<->SATA I use there called "DEXP IDE - SATA", and cost just 15$ for two.






Now, for X5000 hardware I ditch the CD completely as it can boot from the USB fine, and want to do it somehow for Pegasos2.

Yes, I know, Pegasos2 can't boot from USB, but in the day of millions of converters/adapters and hardware emulators, I curious if there something like some kind of converters/hardware-switchers, which will make pegasos2 think it is a real CD, while it will be USB stick with.

I.e. I connect to SATA cable some device, in which I attach USB stick with ISO raw-written to it, and then this hardware emulator/converter will say to pegasos2 that this is real CD-Drive, while in reality, it will USB stick, and peg2 will be fooled and boot from it like it CD-drive.

Maybe anyone knows if there something which I can buy for this purpose?

And any other ideas on how to ditch CD-Drive from Pegasos2 and still be able to boot from something which is not HDD appreciated! Thanks!

At the moment I found some Zalman ZM-VE350 thing, which has inside inbuild virtual cd-drive emulator, but I not sure if it can be connected to SATA: it has SATA support, but for HDD/SSD you connect to. But with a computer, it operates as far as I can see from USB. But then, if the motherboard does not support boot from USB, then does not matter what kind of hardware emulator you put on, it will not boot.

From another side, there is also USB<->Sata cable, so maybe it will be possible to connect this Zalman thing to peg2's IDE like this: Zalman-<usb2sata>-<sata2ide>

Find out lately that I have a SII3114 PCI SATA card (for all images click on them for fullsize):

Images of the box (in case someone may need serial numbers, publisher, etc):



Manual (see there on the front of manual it called SA3114, not SII3114, while inside SIL3114):



Device itself:




Now, from the OS side we add to Kicklayout:

MODULE Kickstart/sii3114ide.device.kmod

And then when we run MediaToolbox it will be like this:



That how looks like when we have 2 SSD connected: one over the usual IDE via SATA2IDE adapter (as shown in the first post), so it still shows as peg2ide.device. And the second one, connected to the Sii card (shown as sii3114ide.device):



So far all good. Through, the speed almost the same as the speed of the SSD connected over IDE2SATA converter sitting on IDE port. Maybe a little bit better. There are results done on SFS 1.290 with identical blocksize/buffers/transfers set for both partitions (one in a test from IDE2SATA SSD, and another one in a test from SSD connected over SII3114). All tests are done by DiskSpeed from os4depot:

http://os4depot.net/share/utility/benchmark/diskspeed.lha

IDE2SATA SFS/00 1.290:

Quote:

SA3114 SFS/00 1.290:

Quote:

So as can be seen, the speed differences are not big ones. Through, it still looks good, and I also want to try to boot from this SI3114 card. At the moment can't maybe someone can bring any ideas about it.

For first, I created a small partition as FFS, put the usual stuff in (amigaboot, bootmenu.txt, etc). Then after reboot going to OpenFirmware.

Now, if we just do "show-devs", the we can see card is detected and listed (see /pci/8x00000000/raid@5):



If i then do "cd /pci/raid" and the ".properties" it give me such kind of output:



So far it looks like everything detected. But then, how to boot from? I tried a few things but fail. Maybe somebody else with better skills about Peg2 can bring an idea?

PS. Btw, the same SI3114 works in X5000 too of course. Through didn't measure speed differences in comparison with onboard SATA. But if it all just about the speed of BUS (as can be seen in the case with PEG2), then speed should be also about the same.

Edit