New IDEFIX Express Adapters Shipping

[Schoenfeld]

Not sure who did the measurement of "5x faster" - the general rule of thumb is "twice as fast with the accelerator you have".

Most 040 and 060 accelerators reduce the speed on the IDE to about 1MB per second. The top speed of 5.1MB per second is only reached with synconously-clocked 030 processors, for example the 42MHz models by M-Tec. Since 040/060 processors don't talk to the A1200 motherboard directly, but through a bus arbiter that also emulates the dynamic bus sizing of the 030 processor, they are losing an average of 1.5 clock cycles. I'd expect an average performance of 2.5MB per second on 040/060/PPC accelerators, which is "about twice as fast" as without express.

IDE-fix express is not as fast as the FastATA controller. However, it supports both 64-bit addressing modes (TD64 and NSD64) and no proprietary re-mapping of partitions and virtual harddrives. Further, it doesn't touch your RDB unless you tell it to (by clicking "save changes to drive" in HDToolbox). Also, if you have the FastATA, you won't be able to take advantage of the clockport-extender that will be out for this year's Xmas business (will allow you to connect up to four clockport devices in the A1200).

I have been asked if this product works in an A600 - it's only sold together with the express-adapter, which does NOT work in the A600. The IDE-adapter itself would, but it would be a waste to buy both, only to use one half of it. Also, the express-adapter must be installed in order to license the software, as it acts as a dongle. The software would come up as a demoversion on an A600.

Thanks for the support - and sorry for my continuous silence on any Amiga-forum in the past few months. I'm still extremely busy with the Viprinet project, which turned out to be much larger than everyone expected.

Jens Schönfeld

[Schoenfeld]

- no soldering required

- Gayle chip is the large one in close proximity of the PCMCIA, between Alice and Lisa.

- no mechanical conflict with Lyra, BVision or Silversurfer

I think IDE-fix express is less popular because it came to the market almost exactly the same time as FastATA - roughly summer 1998. Most people probably thought that "express" is just a new name for something that I have been providing for years and that others have copied in tenthousands, so I've only sold less than 1000 units between summer '98 and today. Back then, I wanted to make a product that can also be sold as "4-drive adapter only", and many resellers didn't even bother to offer the express-adapter with it. While selling more than 2000 express-capable 4-drive adapters, almost nobody has actually bought the express-upgrade, therefore I decided not to offer the two parts separately any more.

I also remember a review in Amiga Format magazine that tested FastATA and IDE-fix express against each other. Although not a single person (including all betatesters) ever reported problems during CD-writing, the person who wrote the review said that on one of many tries he had a flaw during CD-writing. This obviously destroyed my market especially in the UK, despite the total separation of the two IDE-ports which allows two IDE-requests at a time (required for on-the-fly-copying of CDs). I was just unlucky that it happened during the review of my product - it could have been the other way round.

Jens