FAST ATA 4000

[Thomas]

It is not the FastATA which takes ages, it is the onboard IDE on the motherboard. As long as there is any kind of drive attached to it, it will boot quickly but if there is no drive connected, the Kickstart will wait up to 30 seconds before it boots from another controller.

There is a hardware hack which solves this on Aminet. IIRC it is called IDE-Killer or similar.

The FastATA might speed up things a little. But it is not the raw transfer rate which makes the system fast. You should first consider replacing the file system by PFS3 or SFS before you decide to buy a new controller. Because optimising seek accesses will improve the speed more than increasing the transfer rate.

And of course the FastATA does not use DMA either, so you should have a fast processor (68060 recommended), too.

The best advantage of the FastATA is that its firmware supports 64 bit commands out of the box. So with an adequate file system (SFS, PFS3, FFS V43+) you are able to handle HDDs bigger than 4GB without any patch and no additional reset is needed.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Get a better IDE cable. An 80 wire UDMA 66 cable (one with different colored connectors) should work better.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Effy wrote:
AMIGAZ : can you read dvd´s with AllegroCDFS  :-?

I just tried a data DVD with mpg videos recorded from TV.

First of all there is no difference between CacheCDFS and AllegroCDFS when it comes to reading DVDs. Both can read data DVDs created with Nero Burning ROM (up to 4GB, I don't have any double-layer ones and my DVD ROM won't read them anyway). And both fail to read DVDs created with packet writing Software like InCD.

However, AllegroCDFS appears to be much faster than CacheCDFS. I tried to play the videos with FroggerNG. While with CacheCDFS the movies stubmble in regular intervals, with AllegroCDFS the playback was absolutely fluid.

There is one major bug in AllegroCDFS, though: when you insert an audio CD, it is shown as a volume with raw data tracks on it (which can be played with Play16 or AHI). But whenever a program tries to inquire the disk size (e.g. the Shell command Info or just a file requester), the file system crashes and the computer becomes unusable.

Bye,
Thomas