Opinions on the Buddha IDE controller?

[Ral-Clan]

I'm seeing that the Buddha IDE controller is pretty cheap.  I'm just toying with the idea of buying one in to put in an A2000.  But how good is the performance in a Zorro II A2000?  I ask this, because I also have a 68040 card in the A2000 that has lots of trouble doing DMA tranfers between its 32-bit RAM and controller cards on the Zorro bus.  With the old A2091 SCSI card it was very slow at transfers until I got a GURU-ROM (which was one of the things that died after about 8 years of good service), which relieved things somewhat (it still wasn't a speed demon - I could only burn a CD at 2x maximum for instance).

The Buddha description says something about using PIO mode....which I understand is a very slow transfer method from my experience of when the A2091 had to kick back to that mode to communicate with the RAM on the 68040 accelerator card.

Has anyone used a Buddha in an A2000?  Are there any drawbacks to the Buddha controller - I've read there are some problems with SD card compatibility?

Also what is the latest version of the Buddha card?  Some dealers have the "Gold" version, some have the "Pheonix" version....

Thanks.

[pan1k]

I've got a phoenix version.. love it. it has td64 for large drives and a 44 pin connector and clockports....

[amigakit]

The latest version is the Buddha Flash Phoenix for all Zorro Amigas (such as A2000, A3000 or A4000 and A1200T with Zorro busboard):

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=486

[KimmoK]

I have Duddha IDE on my A4000.
It's ok, I think it works like/as well as A4k motherboard IDE.

I plan to try it on A2000 someday.

[new2amga]

I have one in my A2000.  I have an accelerator in my A2000 so with the Buddha card I get about 2.3MB a second on transfer speed as listed by sysinfo.  It's not bad, much faster than my old 2091 card as I didn't have any expansion memory on it.  It's not a bad buy in my opinion.  The only issue I have with it is you have to consume one of your 3.5 FDD slots unless you are very creative with how you mount the hard drive.

Nathan

[quarkx]

I had bought one in Sept 2008,from AmigaKit, and installed it for about 2 hours in my A2000. I do not know what the problem was, but it cause my A2000 boot in OVER 5 minutes. I then removed it and it was back to less then a minute. Because I could never find a proper manual for it (it was the Phoenix edition), I then immediately sold it on e-bay, never looking back. If you do a search, you will see a lot of my posts over this and the fact that no one could ever produce or find a real manual for the Phoenix (although a lot of posters put up imaginary links to the so called manual, but if you look at the link, you will NEVER find one) I got really frustrated with the whole experience. Trust me, stick with the Scsi and you will have no issues.

[trilobyte]

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