it depends of the hardisk....new 2.5 hardisks are very very silent and are very fast...much faster than any CF card ...about 2.7mb /s on the internal A1200 ide
Hrrmmm.. Maybe I'm not understanding something here.
All major manufacturers of Compact Flash cards sell cards that are capable of 600x, which is 90MB/s. And that's megabytes per second.
Lexar, Sandisk, Kingston, and so on.
But let's say price is more important. A $11 card gets you a 4gb and at around 20MB/s.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208339Only the best of the best 2.5" mobile hard drives can even sustain 90MB/s.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,53.htmlAnd let's talk about access times: top scoring western digital 2.5 drive is 14.5 ms. Compact flash: about .25ms. (66 times faster)
All of this doesn't matter much, because the real limitation is the amiga hard drive controller(and the various parts that make up the I/O subsystem). That's the bottleneck. Even the cheapest of the hard drives or cards will be fast enough.
I recently switched from hard drive to compact flash and I LOVE IT. So much better.
The only concern w/ compact flash is that you do have a maximum number of writes per location, which is about 1 million. On a modern OS like Windows, this is probably not enough but on amigaos, it should be ok.
