SPIDER software update 3.16
[17 May 2008]

Elbox Computer is happy to announce availability of a new version of the spider.device driver for the Poseidon stack for the SPIDER and SPIDER II High-Speed USB 2.0 controllers. The new software is available free of charge for all registered users of the SPIDER and SPIDER II High-Speed USB 2.0 controllers.

The SPIDER software has been reworked in order to achieve the maximum possible performance, especially when SPIDER is used in the Mediator systems equipped with the Radeon 9200 graphic card. The large memory on the Radeon cards enables expansion of the DMA buffer used by PCI cards in the busmaster mode. The spider.device ver. 3.16 allows setting the DMA buffer size for the Spider EHCI controller from 40 kB (as used in the previous spider.device versions) up to 2 MB. The size of the Spider DMA buffer is defined by the Envarc:Mediator/SpiderBuf variable.

Go to the tests page to learn the benchmarks for the SPIDER card with the DMA buffer set to 2 MB. The tests were performed on Amiga 1200 and Mediator 1200 TX with the most popular turbo cards. A 4 GB USB memory stick was used in the tests.

The Hi-Speed USB mass storage devices connected to the SPIDER USB controller reach 3 to 5 MBytes/s (depending on the turbo card), which is fast enough to allow comfortable work with the USB devices like memory sticks, digital cameras and Flash card readers. In case of hard drives we still recommend connecting them to the FastATA controllers, which allow twice as fast transfers (5 to 10 MBytes/s) in the same turbo card configuration (see the FastATA MK-III benchmarks).

Now we are working on the OS4 native USB 2.0 drivers for the Sirion USB stack. They will be included in the next SPIDER update.



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