3 more products added Catweasel etc

[mindprober]

Anyone have any experience with using the Buddha in an A3000? Since I have so many small (but still in the GB range) IDE hard drives I've collected over the years, I thought it would make more sense to use one of these than to seek out a larger SCSI drive.

Is the performance as good if not better that the A3000's SCSI? I'm sure this will also depend on what drive mechanism I choose to use.

What IDE specification does the Buddha compare to in the PC world? Is it considered UDMA? Judging by the cable in the photo, I know it isn't UDMA-66.

[mindprober]

That would depend on the drive largely. The performance seemed to be on level with the built in SCSI, but I honestly never ran benchmarks. The nice thing is you can use absurbly large HD sizes cheap, where SCSI would be expensive.

Quite true. Much more cost effective this way. I could adapt my 9GB UW SCSI HD internally but it runs too hot and noisy. My only concern with the Buddha is how to run the ribbon cable across the A3K's expansion slot card. Hopefully, it won't be obstructed once the case is put back on.

No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4. Even the newest UDMA drives are backwards compatible though, so they will work.

Sounds good. You may see an email from me regarding the eBay ad.  

[mindprober]

tjaoz wrote:
@redrumloa

No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4.

PIO-3 or PIO-4? :-o

As a distributor of the Buddha card you should rather know that it works in PIO-0 only.

Due to the limitation of the Zorro II interface this card  cannot even reach in A2/3/4000 computers the full PIO-0 speed.  

D'oh!! So, what does tha mean in terms of performance comparable to the A3K's SCSI? Have we just fallen a couple of notches?!?

[mindprober]

adolescent wrote:

I'm going to have to agree with tjoaz here.  The theoretical transfer rate of PIO-0 is 3.2MB/s.  I don't think I've seen anything over 3MB/s on the Z2 bus (Buhdda bencharks show a max of around 2.8MB/s on Z3).

I take that to mean that the card supports Zorro 3 mode. Nice. Strange that this fact was omitted from the product web page. You would think this would be an important sales point. Although, it wouldn't appear to make much of a difference in real world performance.  

[mindprober]

All this bad Elbox press has me concerned. Should I hold off on purchasing any of their *other* products?!? Unfortunately, there aren't many other companies offering Tower and PCI expansion kits.