dreher.net

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but do we have an idea how the I/O of the CFFA3000 compares to a ramdrive on the old Apple IIe?

I am trying to reconstitute from backup disks, a BBS I ran back in the eighties. I wonder if I should bother with the ramdrive, since I will be using the CFFA3000.

Thanks,
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Well, if anybody is interested, I did a little test using my original CFFA card and a ram drive. The ram drive would typically be used to load in program modules as needed, so is basically a read-only device.

For the test, I loaded a text file into both. The file contained 662 lines of text. I then ran a little search utility which reads in each line in sequence and checks it for the text being searched for. This was on an non-accelerated IIe.

It took 77 seconds to read each line in the ram drive, and 78 seconds reading from the CFFA card. I don't know how the original CFFA card will compare with the new (just ordered) CFFA3000, but I suspect the CFFA3000 will not be any slower. :)

So, based on this, I think it is not worth the hassle of the ram drive (and I could use the slot).

Skip

Just another update. I replaced the RAM card with an AE transwarp accelerator, I included acceleration on the CFFA (original) card slot. I then re-ran the read test from the previous post. It took 24 seconds to complete reading from the CFFA card, down from 78 seconds without the accelerator card.

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