Looking to use a CF boot drive. I have read the speed is only 2.5Mb/s, a bit slow for a boot drive! Is it a correct number?
yes that is correct speed for ide. pio2 mod can net you a bit more but requires soldering. amiga stock ide is horrible.
The scsi makes better sense but onboard scsi was not blistering fast either. the best solution is a warpengine or phase5 accelerator with scsi,but i guess you dont want to spend a arm and leg.
acard AEC-7720U scsi to ide bridge will allow cf on the scsi,this works well,but cost is a issue of course.good for around 5MB/s or so with synchronous scsi mode enabled.
as for small programs-not all are small, drive speed does make a difference, if you deal with video files, mp3's pics,etc. they are bigger than 2MB. Some files i've messed with are easily 100MB and loading on slow ide is torture.
