CF with Ramfast

[Wayne Stewart]

I was trying to get an ide to compact flash adapter to work with an A-
card SCSI to ide adapter. Didn’t have any luck so I thought I’d spring
for one of those SCSI to Compact Flash adapters from Mechware. It
arrived yesterday so I’ve been busy. Looking for a system to copy over
to it I pulled out a IIgs with a Vulcan HD and a ZipGS. First SCSI
card I chanced upon was an Apple Hi-speed SCSI card. Worked well
enough but the Vulcan was booting a bit faster. Dug out a Ramfast rev
D and it did a lot better easily beating the Vulcan. Next I pulled out
my CFFA card and copied it’s system over. Compared them and the
Ramfast was a fair bit faster.
A while back I ended up with a few 128mb CFs so that’s what I’ve been
using but I know there’s a lot faster CFs out there. Mainly 128mb is a
little on the small side. Don’t mind spending a few dollars but I’m a
little concerned with compatibility. Pulled a 4gb Lexar out of a 9600
but that doesn’t seem to be compatible. I can format it but when I
copy to it the IIgs tends to crash. Unless someone’s got a suggestion
of some currant CF, I guess I need to hunt down some older CFs.
Probably I should have done this a few years back when smaller CFs
were in the stores.

[Michael J. Mahon]

I'm also looking for a few name-brand, smaller CF cards, like 256MB, and
feel that I missed the "clearance sale" window. ;-)

The speed of the CFFA is, I believe, independent of the speed of the CF
card, since they are all faster than an Apple II can drive them.

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

[David Schmidt]

On 6/13/2012 2:41 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> Wayne Stewart<waynej...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> (...) I guess I need to hunt down some older CFs.

>> Probably I should have done this a few years back when smaller CFs
>> were in the stores.
>
> I'm also looking for a few name-brand, smaller CF cards, like 256MB, and
> feel that I missed the "clearance sale" window. ;-)
>
> The speed of the CFFA is, I believe, independent of the speed of the CF
> card, since they are all faster than an Apple II can drive them.

I've picked up batches of Sandisk 128s and 256s from ebay. I've not
looked recently, but looking today ("sandisk 256 compact") - I see
sellers have gotten a bit greedier in the mean time. ;-)

[D Finnigan]

I'll give out my secret again. I had great success buying the the cheapo 128
MB CF cards from those sellers in Hong Kong. They should be less than $3.
Now, the downside is that the shipping time is pretty expansive. I seem to
recall it took over a week to arrive. But the price is low, and these
sellers want to ensure that you have a good customer experience. The seller
sent me a message asking if everything had arrived OK.

I got both an IDE-CF adapter and a 128 MB CF card for less than $10 from
eBay.

--
]DF$
Mac GUI Vault - A source for retro Apple II and
Macintosh computing.
http://macgui.com/vault/

[Wayne Stewart]

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.

I'll watch my local CL and I'm sure I'll eventually pick some up

[Brian]

Like the Davids said, ebay is the way to go as these cards are still
widely available and cheap. As for speed, the Microdrive is still the
fastest HD solution I have, but the CFFA3K is still my #1 choice for
obvious reasons.

[Michael J. Mahon]

I last looked on eBay about a year ago, and prices were not cheap
(especially per megabyte!). I'll have to look again soon.

I remain dubious about the endurance of no-name brands, since a card can be
severely stressed and error correction makes it look OK until all its
spares are used...

[Sean Fahey]

On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 2:35:32 PM UTC-5, D Finnigan wrote:

> I'll give out my secret again. I had great success buying the the cheapo 128
> MB CF cards from those sellers in Hong Kong. They should be less than $3.

I've ordered a few things from HK without issue, but I expect most of the things I order are either exotic or knock-offs.

If you've had good luck with a particular seller (especially for a memory-related product), would you share their ID?

[ict@ccess]

I use a Sandisk 8 GB on Rich Drehers CFFA card. I wrote a driver that
allows me to have 256 drives of 32 MB each. Only works under Prodos 8
though. But does not affect what GSOS sees. Can still have up to 14
of the 256 drives show up on GSOS.

I paid $40 for 8 GB. Don't know how this card works with a SCSI-CFFA
adapter. But I have had good luck with Sandisk.

Rob

[Steven Hirsch]

On 06/13/2012 06:09 PM, Sean Fahey wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 2:35:32 PM UTC-5, D Finnigan wrote:
>
>> I'll give out my secret again. I had great success buying the the cheapo
>> 128 MB CF cards from those sellers in Hong Kong. They should be less than
>> $3.
>
> I've ordered a few things from HK without issue, but I expect most of the
> things I order are either exotic or knock-offs.

I'm almost positive the SanDisk items I purchased from HK are forgeries (logos
look "off"). You do run a small, but finite, risk of getting the shipment
seized by US Customs. They spot check for things like this.

[Leandro M Polimeno]

Rob,

Works with 1.9 version of ProDOS ?!?

I reaalllyy want to try this on my ][+ with a CFFA 1.4 and a 128MB CF
(on SLOT7, because in SLOT 5 i can see all 4 partitions).

Regards,

Polimeno

ict@ccess escreveu:

[Wayne Stewart]

I tried adjusting my Ramfast settings and seem to have the 4gb Lexar
booting. I'll have to run it more to see if it's 100% stable but it's
looking good.
It seemed a bit faster than the 128mb CF so I timed it and it was a
little faster. I"ll be picking up a couple of SanDisk 256mb CFs this
weekend so I'll see how those work.

[D Finnigan]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> I remain dubious about the endurance of no-name brands, since a card can
be
> severely stressed and error correction makes it look OK until all its
> spares are used...

Well, since I'm not using my Apple II to store mission-critical data, I'm
willing to overlook that factor. ;-)

I've had my 128 MB no-name CF card for about a year now, and I haven't had
any issues with it yet.

[D Finnigan]

Yeah, here's the email I got for the IDE-CF adapter. See, these people care:

Hi,

Hi! We are the eaby seller source_kit.

10 days have passed since your
item was shipped. It should be soon to come to you. In normal conditions,
it takes around 7-21 business days.

When you receive it, we sincerely
hope that you will like it and appreciate our customer services. If you
have anything you feel unsatisfied with, please do tell us. So we can know
what we should do to help you. In the meantime, we will get to know where
we should improve.

If you are satisfied, we sincerely hope that you can
leave us a positive comment and four 5-star Detailed Seller Ratings, which
are of vital importance to the growth of our small company.
Besides,
PLEASE DO NOT leaves us 1, 2, 3 or 4-star Detailed Seller Ratings because
they are equal to negative feedback. Like what we said before, if you are
not satisfied in any regard, please tell us.

Thanks once more for your
purchase.

Yours Sincerely,
Source_kit


-----------------

And here's the message from the 128 MB CF card seller:

Thank you for shopping with us.Your item has been shipped by
airmail(regular mail) from singpost to destinations.(Normally it takes
12-22 business days to USA Canada UK Australia.For other Countries of the
world it will take between 10-45 days to arrive.)We hope it arrive on time
but since this is an international delivery,shipping time will be highly
depended on the courier company and local customs/duties.International
shipping requires more complicated shipping procedures (such as both
countries customs,transit stations etc.),it will probably take longer time
for your items to arrive at the final destination.Please be patient, Thank
you for your understanding on this matter.
Hope you satisfy with our
total service,and we look forward to the good feedback with overall full
detailed ratings after you get the item.It's important for us to drive more
potential customers.If you have any questions/comments,please feel free to
contact us anytime.
Cheers
Seller ID:aaseller0668

-aaseller0668


----------

Both of these sellers had around 20,000 feedback at the time, IIRC.

[ict@ccess]

On Jun 14, 9:21 am, Leandro M Polimeno <leandro.polim...@ig.com.br>
wrote:

> Rob,
>
> Works with 1.9 version of ProDOS ?!?
>
> I reaalllyy want to try this on my ][+ with a CFFA 1.4 and a 128MB CF
> (on SLOT7, because in SLOT 5 i can see all 4 partitions).
>
> Regards,
>
> Polimeno
>

Yes, the version of Prodos does not matter nor the Apple computer,
since the driver is linked to the device table. I believe I wrote
this before the second version of CFFA came out so will only work with
CFFA 1.4

You can read more here and get the driver. The driver was programmed
for slot #5, but just follow the directions to change to slot #7.
Also, the heading was supposed to read "supports 128 GB" instead of
108 GB but the driver only supports 8 GB
http://dreher.net/forum1/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=184&sid=5d892058e0ba3204056954c4440d6cba

Rob

[Christopher G. Mason]

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.

[Leandro M Polimeno]

Rob,

Tks pointed to me.

Regards,

Polimeno

ict@ccess escreveu: