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Apple II SCSI v. High-Speed SCSI

MattCarp

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 5, 2003
Messages
279
Location
Atlanta, Georgia (USA)
I was curious, how much faster is the High-Speed SCSI card in an Apple IIe?

The Apple IIe itself must be the bottleneck, so I can't imagine that a high speed card is that much better? Does it have a large buffer?
 
The high speed card does DMA, directly transferring to memory without loading down the CPU. The max theoretical throughput is about 1 megabyte / second with the high speed card, as it's an 8 bit bus at 1 MHz. Actual throughput is less, but still very fast compared to the regular SCSI card.
 
This spreadsheet (not mine) is for timings on the Apple IIgs. It shows different disk and file benchmarks for a few different storage devices and SD card solutions, etc. It's interesting.

 
The CFFA3000 isn't all that "fast" despite being solid state storage. My RamFAST Rev. D easily outperforms it using 30 year old mechanical hard drives! Granted, the RamFAST is a proper DMA enabled design, but its still faster even with DMA turned off.
 
I recently acquired some old Apple ][ equipment and there was an Applied Engineering Vulcan card, cable and hard drive/power supply.
I have not tried it yet. Anyone use one of them? I have some working ][e computers but not a ][gs yet. I removed a leaky battery from a
][gs board and have not replaced it yet.
 
I recently acquired some old Apple ][ equipment and there was an Applied Engineering Vulcan card, cable and hard drive/power supply.
I have not tried it yet. Anyone use one of them? I have some working ][e computers but not a ][gs yet. I removed a leaky battery from a
][gs board and have not replaced it yet.
I have several.

The Vulcan cards for the IIe and IIgs are the same however the EPROM on them are different.
If you have a IIgs without a battery you can still use it. With the Vulcan card in slot 7 it should boot off it assuming you have enough RAM and everything’s in working condition
 
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