Is Elbox A4000 ATA controller DMA?

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Adding DMA support to card would have increased the costs but the main problem would have been old buster versions...and incompatibilities with other cards due to the use of Z3 DMA. I can't remember many Zorro3 DMA cards. I only remember the old cbm 4091 and the FastlaneZ3, both seem to cause problems. It seems it's difficult to implement z3 dma correctly.

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@mikeymike
being able to burn CDs fast with cheap cd writers is a good point ;-)
Or just to get faster access to your hd...

depending on the number of drives you want to use an ide<->scsi adaptor would be a good idea... it wouldn't slow down your system and still would allow you to buy cheap drives...

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@duesi:
Well, I didn't mean that using that cards always gives problems, but if one of these cards don't like the other you'll run into problems... A friend of mine (Hi Reg0 ;-) )has a Picasso4, a Faslane and some other cards and he has problems... And these problems would be even bigger if he used to dma zorro3 cards (an hypotethic ide dma and a scsi dma controller for example...)

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@mikeymike
my definition of "fast" is being able to burn cds at the maximum cd writer speed instead of 4x

PIO 0 (that's the internal 1200 port) sucks even more than PIO 4. If you don't believe me go to a peecee and force all your drives to run in PIO-0.

Now force all your drives to PIO-4. Is it a big improvement or not?

With a powerflyer you should get around 5MB/s, just like many scsi drives with A1200 controllers...

As I have said that investment depends on the number of drives you plan to use. If you only need a big and fast hard drive, buy an IDE 120GB hard drive for 100€, plug in a scsi<-->ide adaptor and you will get a smooth and fast system. With a cyberstormMK3 or PPC it will probably be the best option (and you will be able to use it with your peggy/AmigaOne if your machine dies).

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Mediator has not DMA to the Amiga Motherboard because it would be really tricky (if not impossible) to do with the 1200 version.

With the A4000 version (I'll call it Zorro3 version) the situation is quite different because DMA can be done (You can buy fastlanes in ebay, they aren't vapourware and they do DMA to the motherboard). It wasn't implemented due to cost: Initially you may think in Commercial reasons (afaik Buster7 can't do DMA in Zorro3... with the Mediator3/4000(T) it doesn't matter because until Buster11 you couldn't have bus master cards that worked correctly). But then you think... why didn't they put a jumper to select the buster version?
A DMA card is far more complex in zorro3 than a non DMA one and takes much more engineers time to test it, may require more expensive components... I think that the final reason is cost or lack of engineering experience and knowledge of the Zorro3 bus.

On the other hand, it seems they have done a good job if we forget the lack of DMA...