Is FastATA 4000 worth its money?

A4000 internal IDE connector is really slow (probably PIO-0 mode). The one and only alternative and improvement method is the FastATA 4000 from Elbox. Is it worth it? Will I see difference during read/write process on a HD?

@Phantom

Hi my friend, :)

These boards are a bit expensive but are great..... I have two FastATA MK-V installed on my A4K's.

Advantages:

- Recognized & Work at boot time without drivers
- Accept big size HDD's (I have 320GB drives installed).
- Accept any CD/DVD
- Works with most CF-IDE adapters
- Performance selectable from PIO0 to PIO5 (I have all my drives running at PIO4 because I use long cables). Sysinfo shows around 11.5 MB/s.

Disadvantages:

- At the moment, not compatible with OS 4.1 Classic

Best wishes

All IDE, (with exception to 1 card that I know*) are Programmed Input / Output, so they depend heavily on the CPU

The onboard A4000 IDE is PIO 1-ish, this will net you just under 2.7MB a second with an 060 pulling it. Cosmos has some re-programmed GAL's that give you a faster boost, about 3.5MB a second..

The Fast ATA Mk4 for the A4000 is stated as handling 16MB persecond, there are even some youtubes with some very fast 10MB per second or more with a raw READ, but I suspect with the given results of AIBB and SYSINFO, I would give a conservative expectation of 8MB per second with a fast CPU and a GOOD quality large cache IDE Harddisk

Hope that helps


*The MasoBoshi Master card uses DMA on both the IDE and SCSI chains. Although this is Zorro 2 bus and requires 16bit memory for the DMA to work - this achieves aproximately 1.7MB persecond with a stock 68000 CPU on my A2000 with the CPU being 80% idle.

Quote:

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.....a fast CPU and a GOOD quality large cache IDE Harddisk

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That's true... without a good CPU and HDD you can't take the best peformance.

Yes, Elbox states a 060 or better a 060/PPC accelerator card (which I have). How you define good HDD? From large cache that it offers? Is the same as Memory buffer?

Yes, is a memory buffer for R/W operations. A large cache increases the overall speed.

So an 8MB of that memory buffer is it good enough?

Yes, of course, 8MB is good. But best if you have HDD's with 16MB :D

Obviously 16MB are SATA ones? I want IDE, so I cannot find something better than 8MB. :unsure:

Cosmos PIO mode 2?