I used a Buddha/Catweasel combo board in my A2000 for a while, with a 68060. It was indeed fast, but something to remember is that IDE uses a lot more of your CPU time than SCSI, in general. SCSI (when it's working right) uses the SCSI chip to do a lot of calculation, freeing up your processor for other tasks. IDE usually is driven mainly by the CPU. As you said, the Buddha will use PIO mode, which is processor-intensive, but is not necessarily "slow." It's not like you can push *that* much over the ZorroII bus anyway. If a GVP HC+8 can do a max of 3.4mb/sec and the Buddha gets 2.6mb/sec on a much cheaper drive, that's not so bad. Plus, you can use cheap ATAPI CD-RW drives with the Buddha, with MakeCD and the included IDE-Fix. With your '040, though, I wouldn't try to do lots of multitasking while burning a CD. And you still might only be able to burn at 2X... what takes a lot of CPU time is making the "ISO" FS on the fly, so if you're also pushing the CPU to do non-DMA PIO data transfer, watch out...
The fastest, most reliable CD burning I've seen on the Amiga is using a decent ATAPI burner on A4000T's IDE bus with IDE-Fix, and pushing data to it from the A4000T's SCSI bus. Not as reliable was my TekMagic '060 burning from SCSI drive to SCSI burner... it would only get 4x on a good day, despite the TekMagic's SCSI bus being so fast.
- t
