Hello ya'll I'm running an Efika from a Compact Flash Drive using a IDE to CF converter. It seems to work fine*, but is anyone else using one?

Has anyone tried a MMC to CF converter as MMC memory cards seem to be significantly cheaper?

* Well with the exception that I had a cheap and cheerful 16Gig cf card that worked fine on Windows style MBR/Fat32 but when I tried to convert it to a MorphOS Style? the drive wouldn't mount, and still wouldn't mount no matter what I did to it.


I've got a SFS 4GB one in at the moment, that sometime in the past I'd converted to SFS, I think I formated it on a A600, but to be honest I really can't remember how I did it.

I know some people using CF cards in Efika. Its indeed a fine solution, but unfortunately drives with a good size are quite expensive.

The cards price shouldn't matter. Normally the price is related to size and speed. Efika IDE only transfers around 5MB/s, so speed can be dropped. The only thing you should do is take a known vendor card, like SanDisk or Transend which garantees you getting a propper ide interface. I have a cheap noname card which sometimes locks the entire IDE bus.

CF->MMC interfaces are a way to get a cheap storage, but you should keep in mind, that mmc cards are serial and much slower than CF. I don't know the actual transfer speeds of mmc cards, but you should ensure its above 6MB/s to not get any performance loss. Also keep in mind, that this is what you get, when you use the card e.g. in a windows system, where disk speed is far more important.

In generally even booting the Efika from usb stick is (with cheating) possible. As USB only delivers 1 MB/s you may think its painful slow, but it isn't. On any Amiga System the media speed isn't that important and only effects bigger files or longer file action. Booting the Efika via USB stick take about 12 seconds longer than from hard drive. Mostly because the boot.img. Loading the boot.img from hard drive increases speed by around 10 seconds.

As you can see its the near zero seek time that increases speed and not the media speed itself. Of course for storing music or movies the flash speed isn't very handy and far to expensive right now.

So if you are sure about the Efika only usage, then you can take the slowest and cheapest card from a vendor. If not, then have a look onto the disk speed and rethink.

Geit



[ Edited by geit on 2009/6/27 12:55 ]

For intrest this is my Scsispeed results for a 4Gb Genuine Sandisk harddrive, how does it stack up against a spinny Hard drive?

Using the MorphOS tool, http://aminet.net/package/disk/moni/DiskSpeedPPC

MorphOS:Tools/DiskSpeed> scsispeed FAST BUF1=8192 BUF2=16384 BUF3=32768 BUF4=65536
Aros ScsiSpeed 4.10 Copyright ? 2004-2006 The AROS Development Team
------------------------------------------------------------------
Processor: PPC MorphOS Build: 51.34 Normal Video DMA
Device: ide.device:0

CPU Calibration shows that CPU availability tests
would be inaccurate in the current system state.
No CPU Speed Rating -- CPU % not available.


Testing with a 8192 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Read from SCSI: 3512729 bytes/sec

Testing with a 16384 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Read from SCSI: 4156620 bytes/sec

Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Read from SCSI: 4671078 bytes/sec

Testing with a 65536 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
Read from SCSI: 4964352 bytes/sec

[ Edited by stephen_robinson on 2009/6/27 13:48 ]

Hi,

I tried two different brand of CF. Try to find a fast one. One of the two CF card seems slower than the other. I did some bench too but didn't remember the results.

If interested, I can spent some time benchmarking my CF.

I guess even the slowest CF card around will be reaching Efikas maximum ide speed, so who cares: :)

If there is a "120x" printed on the card, then it can handle around 18 MB/s. That is already 3 times faster than the Efika can handle.

Geit

[ Edited by geit on 2009/6/27 16:42 ]

I've also trashed a CF card by trying to write an RDB partition table to it so I'd be interested to know why some CF cards fail this way.

Also, is it remotely possible that this 'damage' can be undone? Is giggledisk capable of something like this?

In an attempt to fix the one I changed to RDG I've tried:-

Reformatting on the MorphOS, the first time the drive was there but the files were not, trying an install again and it wouldn't see the hard drive at all.

Putting the card into a usb reader on my Micro-Amiga-1 +Amiga OS4.1 and it only came up once, as unreadable, most of the time it didn't come up at all, but when it did come up I couldn't read the drive data. Pretty much the same on a Windows PC, attaching it internally on the IDE cable didn't mount on my ?A1, did come up on a PPC, but with a size of 0bytes.

so I couldn't do it.

I tend to use HDWrite when this kind of thing happens, it'll let you get rid of any trace of corrupted RDB or MBR on your disk. That is usually enough to let any OS or tool partition and format your card/disk again.

An easier way is to use HDConfig.

Simply select another boot sector type like MBR, save and then swap tos RDB again and save. Now you have a clean RDB on disk.

HDConfig is erasing the unused blocks to avoid mounting/detection troubles. Storing RDB causes the MBR to be wiped and vice versa.

Geit