StarWind Software

I just tried StarPort on Windows 2000 SP4 machine and it works quite nice except ... but let me explain the situation.

The reason I want to use Starport (or StarWind - but later one doesn't work out of the box on Windows 2000) is because I want to use an old Digisuite LE video card (can't go beyond Windows 2000 with RTX developer library which we own), which can only play/record video off SCSI drives. I tried installing Starwind on another machine, which can run it, and connect to it through MS Initiator. Everything works nice, and Digisuite is happy with the drive it sees.

So then I installed Starport on the local machine and set up a file based iSCSI drive. While I can work with it from windows with no problems, Digisuite rejects it completely. Thus I suspect that Starport's SCSI emulation is not 'perfect'. Are there any plans to improve on SCSI emulation in the future?


Greets, Toni

Toni,

When you create a device using StarPort, do you select "Local iSCSI device" or "Remote iSCSI device"? Also, does your card display any error messages or any other types of warnings, or is it just not able to see the target created by StarPort?
MS iSCSI Initiator does actually work with Windows 2000, so you can use it to connect to remote StarWind targets, mount them as local and point your card to these targets.

Thanks.

Hello Robert,


I think I used 'local iSCSI device' (I actually created a SCSI image file and mounted that). Digisuite sees the drive (I can select the AVI to play), but then it fails on opening the AVI the same way it does off the IDE/SATA drives (gives a message that file is corrupt).

I tested things further then, and created a Starwind iSCSI target, and used first MS Initiator (which worked), then StarPort (also just as initiator to StarWind) and that worked also. It just didn't want to work when used without StarWind.

But now I have another problem, which I hope to get solved, but don't know how to proceed. The problem is this (and happens with either MS Initiator or StarPort): The write speed (when working with Digisuite) is useless - below 1MB/sec. Not so, if I just copy files inside windows (then it's around 45MB/sec). Reading is approximately the same in Windows or Digisuite - around 45MB/sec. Is there any kind of logging that I could turn on, which would tell me, what Digisuite is 'doing to the disk' to get such abysmal performance? My best guess is that it's not a StarWind/StarPort problem per se, but rather something that has to do with SCSI emulation layer, and the way Digisuite accesses the drive.


Greets, Toni

Toni,

What I could suggest is try installing Spotlight by Quest Software on both Pcs - it's quite an intuitive piece of software that will give you the clues to the bottlenecks.

Thanks.