On 6/13/2012 3:56 PM, Wayne Stewart wrote:
The speed difference on the Ramfast may be just due to the on card cache or more likely DMA. Wouldn't mind comparing some different speeds of CF though. Mostly I want at least a 256mb CF.
In my benchmarks, the RamFAST completely blows the CFFA3000 out of the water in terms of I/O performance. Keep in mind that my RamFAST (with stock 256k cache) is connected to an 23 year old Apple 20SC hard drive which is much slower then any flash device. Its most noticeable in Finder when closing a window and updating FINDER.DATA for that folder. The windows close instantly with the RamFAST volumes (does that card do write-back caching or just write through?), while they take a second or two with the CFFA3000 volumes. General I/O like program loading is roughly the same (percentage of cache hits factor in on the RamFAST side, flash has a seek advantage). Most folks won't notice this on a stock 2.8Mhz IIgs, but the lag is quite annoying with a 12Mhz, 32k cache equipped TranswarpGS!
Note that I did these benchmarks with the native RamFAST driver installed. The CFFA3000 might have some added overhead using the GS/OS generated Smartport driver. A future update to add DMA (and a native GS/OS driver?) to the CFFA3000 might narrow the playing field, but right now the RamFAST is king in terms of I/O performance.