ok, from my understanding, the PIO mode settings you set on the buddah card is how fast the card talks to the drive, and has nothing to do with how fast the card talks to the amiga. you are limited to the zorro2 limits of 2-3MB/s
for those interested, here are the numbers.
PIO mode 0 - cycle time 600ns - Max Xfer 3.3MB/s
PIO mode 1 - cycle time 383ns - Max Xfer 5.2MB/s
PIO mode 2 - cycle time 240ns - Max Xfer 8.3MB/s
PIO mode 3 - cycle time 180ns - Max Xfer 11.1MB/s
PIO mode 4 - cycle time 120ns - MAX Xfer 16.7Mb/s
so PIO mode 0 with a decent drive, will max out zorro2, and the amiga's onboard IDE. the best i've personally seen on the built in IDE port is 2.9MB/s.
sure, a Zorro3 fastATA card will push bigger numbers, but you need a big (060?) CPU to get anywhere near PIO mode 4's maximum speed. this is why DMA is good, and PIO is pants in comparison. PIO, will serve you well if its all you got.
for those who like a bit of data sadomasacisum (however you spell it), you can put a 4 way IDE adadapter on the internal port and run two hard disks, a DVD rom, and a Zip drive off of it at the same time, if you like. such a setup served me well untill i could afford to get an accelerator with scsi.
so for the best of both worlds, cheap IDE drives, and SCSI performance/lack of CPU usage, i'd get an IDE2SCSI adapter or two. vesalia.de have them in stock. they work on both IDE hard drives, and IDE CD/DVD drives.
as for the most amount of drives in an A4000D case, thats 2 internal 3.5" half height drives, 2 external 3.5" half height drives, and one external 5.25" drive.
hope this helps. :-)
