IDE - usb through a Spider - a good alternative to powerflyer?

[ChaosLord]

USB
is sloooow
is crap
wastes massive amounts of cpu power

Above comments apply to 3 Ghz Pentium 4 as well as .05Ghz 68060.

You should never use USB for high speed data transfers; that is exactly what USB is NOT made for.

USB is ok for, say, a digital camera that you connect once per day and transfer some pics over.

The worst possible use for USB that I can think of is to use it as a hard drive interface.

[ChaosLord]

Piru wrote:

Elbox is also advertising Mediator 1200#? "transfer rate up to 264MB/s", but failing to mention it's only for PCI<->PCI transfers in optimum cases.

Sure it's a nice speed, but quite useless since most of the time you actually need the data to be moved to/from the system memory (or cpu). For that the actual speed is about 1/20th (or less) of the advertised speed.

It is less than that.  I have a Mediator in my A1200T/060.  I have run busspeedtest on it many times.  I consistently get 9 MB/s which is only 2 MB/s faster than I can transfer data from slow old chipram.

There is a jumper on the Mediator that I can change which lets me then get 11-12 MB/s transfers but then the computer randomly crashes.  I think due to the elbox gfx card driver is not compatible with 12 MB/s transfers.


Elbox annoyingly and intentionally does not mention these facts on their website.

[ChaosLord]

@mboehmer_e3b

Greetings person with the unpronounceable name. :-D

I would like to thank you for such an informative message.

I wish more people would write messages like yours, all chock full of delicious and yummy technical infos!