A little advice on IDE compactflash formatting

[Xamiche]

I thought I'd tack my question onto the back of this thread, rather than creating a new one for this little question. I'm currently formatting a 5GB CF Micro Drive in my Amiga 600HD. The thing is, it's taken the better part of the last 3 hours to format half of a 1GB partition. This seems pretty slow to me. Is this a normal speed? Are CF MicroDrives slower than 2.5" HDs?

[Xamiche]

amiga1260 wrote:
A CF card is slower than a HD. I use SYSINFO 3.24 to benchmark the speed with my Kingston CF Card and a 170 MB 2.5 " HD from Seagate.

The HD has a benchmark of 620 kb/s and my Compact flash 524 Kb/s.

SysInfo is not the best bench mark program to test the speed of your Hard drive.

You could better format you Micro drive with fast format or try it format on a PC with Winuae.

I tried the PC with WinUAE thing. It seemed to work, but when I transferred the drive to a real Amiga it was as though the drive where completely empty. I think for fast format to work there needs to be a current file system intact. The the Amiga didn't even recognise the partitions I had create with WinUAE. I think it might just be a matter of trial and error with a few tweaks. One thing to note, the card is not Flash RAM. It's actually a microdrive, which is a mini hard disk. I was certain it would be slower, but not as slow as it is running now. It's taken 3 hours to format 500MB. That just doesn't seem right.

[Xamiche]

I think the problem is my Amiga is not seeing the CF card as a HD, but as a giant FD. I've put the CF card back in my PC and am trying to format it there with WinUAE again. I'm not sure why it didn't work last time, but hopefully I can find the right set up to make it work this time.

Edit:
Seems to have worked this time around. Formatting the CF drive in WinUAE is a good deal faster than on my real Amiga and I can load it up with what ever software I need then transfer it to the real thing. Can't think why it didn't work last time. I haven't done anything different.  :-?

Edit 2:
Gah! Gremlins. The partition keeps falling off. I'll format the disk, install WB and all seems fine, but then I'll reboot WinUAE and the partition just disappears. Not always on the first reboot, but after a couple. It's like something is nuking the partition without me knowing about. Probably Windows is doing something I can't see that kills the partition. I think I'm going to have to format, install and GTFO before Windows rains on the picnic.  :evil: