Internal a1200 IDE interface

[fishy_fiz]

Firstly, Im wondering what the maximum speed obtainable on the internal ide interface of an a1200 is ? On my 40mhz '040 system + old 10gig drive the speed leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe I'd just adjusted to using an external scsi card, or using my amithlon box, but things seems to be slower than I remembered. Does 1MBps (give or take a few hundred KB) seem excessively slow ? I know it's never going to be fast, but I have a sneaking suspicion my drive is a bit on the crap side. Im getting a larger drive soon, but Im interested to find out any info in regards to the internal interface before I do so as to help shape what I purchase. Also, is it possible to run multiple devices off of it ? I vaguely recall that it is, but it's recomended not to be done ?

[fishy_fiz]

Thanks for all the responses everyone, there's some good info. amongst all that. I'll definately look into some alternate ide interface in the future when money allows, but I was wondering if for a temporary solution it'd be possible to connect both a 3.5 inch ide drive and a dvdrom from the internal ide interface + 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch convertor? (given a power source of course)

[fishy_fiz]

The thing is though it's not like a harddrive is constantly reading one area of a disk, so 1-2 meg is quite painful a lot of the time. Extracting/compressing large files can be quite torturous.

[fishy_fiz]

You're right it's not like the HD is constantly reading from the disk when extracting or compressing large archives.  Because with compressed files,  I think it's CPU cycle intensive a lot more than dependent on a particularly fast IDE interface.  Even when extracting, but especially when compressing, CPU speed is a lot more relevant than IDE and HD speed.  My experience is even when compressing files, with a utility like LZX, it is rather fast to HD.  That is, as long as it's not set to the highest compression level, which compresses to the max., at the full expense of CPU time.  Any other setting is fast on compression (though still very efficient).  And extraction is very fast.

That's pretty innacurate though. When extracting/compressing there's both reading and writing happening at te same time with shifts back and forward on the disk platters. That's a big part of why its so slow. Extracting to RAM proves this. Extracting even a 50 meg file is painfully slow, let alone things like isos. Yes cpu makes a difference, but harddrive speeds are a bottleneck.

[fishy_fiz]

I guess my perspective was more for a faster system. An '030 I guess is still slow enough for the cpu to be as much of an issue is the interfaces throughput. Using a real scsi drive or RAM is much faster for compression/decompression than the internal ide interface, even on the same machine, which shows that cpu isnt as much of a bottleneck as the interface itself.