IDE Compact Flash on A4000 initial review

[Dr_Righteous]

Well it was just crazy enough to try... So, I got ahold of an IDE to compact flash adapter off Ebay for US$15+S/H. I had a 8M 4x CF card laying around, so when I got it in I hooked it all up to my A4000D.

Worked well right off the bat... So I installed WB3.1 on it....

HOLY SH*T!!! This is an enormous acceleration in boot time! As soon as the machine has power to all the components (ie: my SCSI hard drive powers up) the Workbench screen pops up... No in between screens, just from black screen to Workbench instantly!

I've found CF cards online up to 1GB and speeds to 30x. I'm not sure what the performance threshold will be with regard to the speed of the cards... I imagine a 12x card is all you need, and is far cheaper than a 30x card.

I need to get a larger CF card to work with... I have a few things I want to try out, but need a bit more space to work with. I'll also post a Sysinfo speed test here shortly. So far this has been well worth playing with!

Props to Amyhr for posting this idea originally.

[Dr_Righteous]

Update:

Ran Sysinfo speed test on the CF drive and compared it to my SCSI hard drive... Here are the results:

2.15GB Seagate ST12400N on GVP A4008 SCSI controller w/8M RAM: 979,367 Bytes/Sec transfer

8MB Generic 4x Compact Flash card on IDE/CF adapter: 1,554,213 Bytes/Sec transfer

Given the boot performance I was expecting a much higher speed. Then again Sysinfo doesn't test seek time either... That and I think I've hit the wall as far as the on-board IDE interface's transfer speed is concerned.

I bet someone with a FastATA controller would have even better results!

[Atheist]

Thanks so much for trying that.

I've been going on and on about that for a while.

Those big CFs aren't that much (well, compared to the capacities of HDs they are). But, for me, if I replace my 180 Meg SCSI that I bought in 1990 for $905 including tax, with a 256 meg.

must be a 1* CF
128 = $65 + tax = $74.43
256 = $100 + tax = $114.5
Canadian dollars

What's the big deal cost wise?

I'm telling you, Amigas are THE BEST!!!!!

You can't do that with win98, or xp. Weeelllllll, you'd need a 512 for 98.

I just searched here and found me refering to it 11 times, the earliest is March 12, 2003. And they now cut the thread records to about 5 months back.

Page 4

Subject : Re: Whatever happend to the Coldfire project?
Posted : 2003/6/11 6:49
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Hi,

The FULL potential of the AGA Amigas has not been shown off yet. (I feel that way, anyway.)

I would like to know,

1) since it takes a couple of seconds for a HD to spin up, could a person load the OS into flashrom to boot up off of, is it big enough, could you put a second flashrom on there for this?

or

1a) Could I boot off of a Compact Flash card? The 25 speed ones?

keltic recently said to me
Subject : Re: Whatever happend to the Coldfire project?
Posted : 2003/6/13 5:42
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Atheist:
Quote:
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1a) Could I boot off of a Compact Flash card? The 25 speed ones?
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Yeah sure see why not(quick google search):
http://www.jactron.co.uk/ad-ide-cf.htm
http://www.emjembedded.com/products/flash/chipdisk.html
http://www.acqu.com/usa/ifd-xxx.htm

I did see some of theese for sale a while back here in Norway but i cannot remember the price, but i'm sure that if they were cheap i would have bought one pronto.

Your name is appropriate for running this test!!! Dr_Righteous!!!
 
What's your boot time, with no harddrives, or CD roms attached (no printers, scanners, etc)? It may be faster, beacause the drives have to go through diagnostics.

This finally vindicates my fanaticism that A M I G A  R U L E S ! ! !

AmigaOne! Upping the ANTE!!!!

[Atheist]

You're probably right about the transfer speed topping out. Back then they couldn't of imagined tranfer rates being able to go that high!

A SCSI interface on an accelerator card may be faster??

I'm quite amazed at the speed, due to, it looks like CFs are 16 bit transfers. Not enough pin holes for 32 bit? Technology, huh?

Could you keep a sustained burst mode transfer? Or switch from synchronous to asynchronous (or vice versa, I don't know how it works)? Try assigning more or less buffers. Maybe a difference?

AmigaOne! CF to boot!!!

[Atheist]

I've wanted to do this for a long time, but can't afford it.

Now I have a MAJOR incentive!

Thanks!

I contacted one of those companies on Friday, but got a hold of a saleslady who wasn't sure what I was talking about. She wasn't sure sure what I meant by PCI card, or "attach to it (PCI IDE controller)" was all about!!!

Like I was gonna waste my time trying to explain what an Amiga was after that!!!

So I don't know the price yet. Their website is a nightmare of NOT explaining what products are, or trying to find the prices associated with said, undescribed product. I might get a call back on Monday.

AmigaOne! Unleash the POWER!

[Terminills]

I see they have 44 pin ones now too.  would be nice for a 1200 or 600 .
http://www.cfide.co.uk/compact_flash_ide_adapters.shtml

[Atheist]

Terminills wrote:
I see they have 44 pin ones now too.  would be nice for a 1200 or 600 .
http://www.cfide.co.uk/compact_flash_ide_adapters.shtml

Maybe I was wrong, small holes, a bit hard to count them all. (How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall? ;-) )

I've seen PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapters. Could those work with A1200s? How about A600s? For booting off of??

A600s PCMCIA was its' ONLY redeeming feature, rarely used, I'd imagine.

AmigaOne! Are you prepared?

[keltic]

I think i will order one or two of theese babies.

[Terminills]

http://www.provantage.com/buy-22071937-addonics-ide-ultra-digidrive-shopping.htm

this one looks nice. if you want a clean look from it.

[Terminills]

thinking about the pcmcia cf adapter... I wonder if that would allow for other CF style upgrades?  CF lan cards, webcams I think I've even seen CF usb lol

[keltic]

Hey this one is quite cool:
http://www.magicram.com/DimmDrive.htm

[Matt_H]

I've seen PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapters. Could those work with A1200s? How about A600s? For booting off of??

Yeah. They work. I tried it out yesterday  :-)  You need a soft driver for them though (cfd.lha from Aminet), so they're not bootable. Commodore's device can recognize the cards, but it thinks they're write-protected and can't do anything with them.

What I'm planning to do is create a Kick floppy to load the driver, and then reassign and boot the system from PCMCIA.

[amyhr]

Thank you so much for trying this out, now we all know.  My trusty A1200 is all packed up for moving, so I won't get to it until the fall, but this is probably one of the first things I'll do.  Until then, I'll have to pick up the IDE-to-flash adapter (for the A1200's 44 pin connector?) A 128-254MB CF card, and an ethernet adapter...

 :-D

[Ohno]

I'd advice you to take a look at this page before bying a CF-card. It compares speed of different cards and it seems the most sold card 'sandisk' (at least here in the Netherlands) is also one of the slowest CF-cards available :-P

@Dr_Righteous

Thanks for the info!

[Matt_H]

'sandisk' ... is also one of the slowest CF-cards available

Darn! That's what I bought!  :-(