3 more products added Catweasel etc

[tjaoz]

@redrumloa

No way to UDMA, the Buddha does not DMA. I'd guess it probably is comparable to PIO-3 or PIO-4.

PIO-3 or PIO-4? :-o

As a distributor of the Buddha card you should rather know that it works in PIO-0 only.

Due to the limitation of the Zorro II interface this card  cannot even reach in A2/3/4000 computers the full PIO-0 speed.  

[tjaoz]

@x56h34

I suppose you wanna recommend FastATA4000 at this point?

Read my post once again and you will see what I really wrote.

You make me sick, you know that?

What is wrong with my post? Don't you like hard facts?

as the speed differece was barely noticeable between IDE/ATA operation between the Buddha and FastATA4000. Sure FastATA4000 was slightly faster, but it was honestly barely noticeable.

My FastATA gives me about 9.6MB/s. Sure, if I set the drive to PIO-0 it does not exceed 2.9MB/s.
FastATA working in PIO-0 is comparable to the Buddha in performance. :-)

If you bothered to do a little research, you would have known that Buddha comes with a little speed setting utility which enables higher PIO modes than mode 0

You are wrong. All Buddha modes have NOTHING to do with PIO modes. None of them is faster than the PIO-0 mode.

It's just that you work for Elbox and you are required to slander all the other products out there.

I do not work for Elbox and have never worked for them.

I simply do not like the way of making business by Redrumloa. IMHO it is not fair if someone who distributes 3rd party products writes untrue information about these products. Even if he adds the word "probably" before the information.

[tjaoz]

@Acill

Thats a load of crap! I used one in my A3000 for a few years in the form of a catweasel s class card. They are
built together on that one. It got software that lets you select your PIO mode. I had it at 4 with no problems.

You missed up the PIO modes with the Individuals' custom modes! These custom modes have nothing to do with PIO modes. All Individuals custom modes are NOT faster than PIO-0 mode.

The cycle times for the PIO modes are as follows: PIO 0 - 600 ns, PIO 1 - 383 ns, PIO 2 - 240 ns, PIO 3 - 180 ns, PIO 4 - 120 ns.
The cycle time is the distance between the start of one read (or write) cycle and the start of next read (or write) cycle. During each read (or write) cycle, the IDE controller reads (or writes) two bytes from (or to) the hard drive. It means that in the PIO-0 mode the controller can transfer 2 bytes per 600 ns. (More about it you can find in the ATA spec http://www.t13.org/project/d1321r3.pdf)

The read (and write) cycle of the Zorro II card fitted in the Zorro slot of A2/3/4000 is 5 x 140 ns = 700 ns. It means that the Zorro II card (Buddha in this case) cannot transfer data from/to hard drive faster than 2 bytes per 700 ns, which is slower than in PIO-0 mode!!!

In the Buddha card, Individuals defined their custom timing for some hard drive signals. These modes are adjusted in the so-called "Buddha speed-register" ($7fe). The numbers you can find at  http://www.schoenfeld.de/inside/Inside_BuddhaE.txt

Looking at these timings you can see that some of these modes slow down the hard drive much UNDER the PIO-0 mode ("Buddha speed-register" values: 1, 2, 6). If you set this register to the value 0, 3, 4, 5 or 7 (and the timing does not break your hard drive requirements) than you hard drive will work faster, but still SLOWER than the full PIO-0 speed.

You can check it taking your hard drive from Amiga to PC, setting PIO-0 and checking its speed. It will work not slower than when connected to the Buddha card, with Buddha  fastest mode selected.

[tjaoz]

@Lemmink
 

What is all this babble about PIO and stuff. Just come around with some realworld data everyone easily
understands. As the ZII bus can not exeed 3 MB/s so the Buddha as a plain ZII card could not too. My experiance is
about 2.3-2.5MB/s in reallive in an 060 exuipted A2000.

What is so obvious, that is that Buddha supports only PIO-0, was not so clear to all here. No wonder if even this card's distributor -Redrumloa- stated that this card "probably" supports PIO3 and PIO4. :-D

Back to PIO modes, it is obvious that all PIO modes consume CPU time. Programmed I/O is performed by the system CPU. The system processor is responsible for executing instructions that transfer data to and from the drive.

And this is the reason why it is always better to have a controller supporting faster PIOs than PIO-0 alone. Remember that in PIO-4 every program to be read from the disk is loaded several times faster than in PIO-0. Of course, during its loading, the processor is heavily loaded with execution of the read operation, but this load lasts several times shorter than in PIO-0.  

If for you the most important issue is that processor load is minimum during data being read from the disk, if you have a controller supporting fast PIOs (PIO-3 or PIO-4), you should reduce the priority of this controller driver. Then reading from the disk would slow down when your CPU is busy with a more important tasks, and will run at full speed when the CPU is not loaded. Period.