Weird issue with Amiga 600

[paul1981]

That's what I'm talking about. It's the Read/Write speeds that makes the overall usage of HD's faster. It's also confirmed by different benchmark programs. The "noise" of an 2.5" HD is hardly noticeable.

I don't want to get involved in any arguments, but I suspect that due to faster seek times on CF drives then they would be faster when used on a heavily fragmented partition, whereas a hard drive would suffer more in this situation due to lower seek times. Of course, large hard disks or ones that have been defragged and optimised will perform just fine.
Amiga's don't really have problems with fragmentation, at least not on the grand scale as Windows does (just speaking from my own experience here).

[AmiDude]

You're using IDEFIX!
2.1MB / Sec is about the max you'll get out of the standard A1200 IDE.

If you had read all posts, then you've had noticed that I also did tests WITHOUT IDE-Fix!
Besides that, both HD and CF had benefit from the faster IDE-Fix adapter. So, it doesn't make any difference.
And 2.1MB isn't the max I get out of the standard A1200 IDE port. My other A1200 with Blizzard1230IV (WITHOUT IDE-Fix) and 2GB HD reaches a speed of 2.8MB p/s. Heck, even my A600/030 with 1GB HD reaches 2,6MB p/s!
I think it all comes down on what type/brand HD/CF and (important) CPU you use.

[AmiDude]

I don't want to get involved in any arguments, but I suspect that due to faster seek times on CF drives then they would be faster when used on a heavily fragmented partition, whereas a hard drive would suffer more in this situation due to lower seek times. Of course, large hard disks or ones that have been defragged and optimised will perform just fine.
Amiga's don't really have problems with fragmentation, at least not on the grand scale as Windows does (just speaking from my own experience here).

That's true. Well spoken.

[paul1981]

You're using IDEFIX!
2.1MB / Sec is about the max you'll get out of the standard A1200 IDE.  And yes IMO "all round" CF Cards rool.  

If you're still around WalterG74 and havent been scared off, a vanilla A600 is probably gonna be less than half the IDE speed of an A1200 probably around 700-800KB / Sec I guess..

Just last week I did a test using sysinfo and got a raw read of 2665871 bytes/sec (2.54MB/sec) on my A1200 with Apollo 1240/40. This is the standard IDE port with just an 80GB Hitachi 2.5" HDD attached.
So it is capable of more than 2.1MB/sec.

[paul1981]

If you're still around WalterG74 and havent been scared off, a vanilla A600 is probably gonna be less than half the IDE speed of an A1200 probably around 700-800KB / Sec I guess..

That would depend heavily on the presence or absence of fast ram.

Just tested this on my vanilla 600 (no fast ram, again...using sysinfo)
702171 bytes/sec 685KB/sec.

I wish I could just order a fast ram expansion from amigakit that slots on the motherboard...it would help the A600 so much. Surely they would be easier to produce by Jens than a full blown accelerator card (which isn't available anymore anyway).

[psxphill]

Of course, large hard disks or ones that have been defragged and optimised will perform just fine.

Sure, if you are only ever sequentially reading through one big file.
 
Being perfectly defragmented doesn't help if you are reading a lot of small files all over the drive.
 
If you have a compact flash that reads at 133MB a second then no Amiga can get close to that transfer rate. Writes are another matter though.

[paul1981]

Sure, if you are only ever sequentially reading through one big file.
 
Being perfectly defragmented doesn't help if you are reading a lot of small files all over the drive.

Yes, true. Amiga software generally doesn't have a million small files to be read though, it normally makes do with just a few or sometimes even just one file. MUI programs use the most I suppose, but they don't use that many in reality.

I'm not for or against CF. At the beginning of this thread I just said I liked real hard drives because of the sounds they make, I'm nostalgic....
Then it turned into this huge argument (which I didn't participate in).

As far as I'm concerned people should use what they are happy with. Classic Amiga's are slow by comparison anyway, so this whole discussion is hardly relevant at all.

[walterg74]

well.. lot of time has passed but I'm finally back from Europe!
 
So yeah, brought back my spare floppy drive, replaced the one in the 600 and it boots up almost instantly (normally in a word), so seems that was the issue after all!
 
Also managed to bring back a CD32 to add to my collection