Re: Request for CF Performance Comparisons

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

pitz wrote:
> I'm sold at using a CF card as my primary "hard disk".  No moving
> parts, and some (though certainly not all) CF cards have almost the
> same MTBF rating as hard disks.  I'm currently using a CFFA setup for
> my IIgs.

I've been using the same CF card for a few years, and have never
had any problem.  The same is not true for three different hard
drives.

Of course, the hard drives are now all "old" drives, and deserve
to be able to fail in peace, but I have no reason to worry about
the reliability of CF card(s) (which are wear-leveled) and trivially
backed-up and restored to new cards, if necessary.

> What I want to find is how it compares, in terms of performance, with
> other CF-based setups, assuming that the CF interface is not the
> bottleneck (i.e., using a very fast CF).

On an 8MHz accelerated //e, the speed of the CFFA never seems to
be a bottleneck at all.

I would also be interested in speed comparisons for typical file
operations, but, subjectively, it's plenty fast enough not to be
an issue.

> I'm curious if using a Focus controller and an IDE-CF adapter is
> better than a CFFA or MicroDrive setup.  Or even a complex setup such
> as a RAMFAST (or HS-SCSI) + SCSI-IDE adapter + IDE-CF adapter.  There
> are some SCSI-CF adapters out there, but not very common.
>
> Can anyone who has more than one of the above setups provide some
> performance characteristics of each?

-michael

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