RamFAST SCSI review
By John Paske
Copyright (c) 1991 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
A REVOLUTION IN HARD DISK OPERATION
For quite some time now one of the major banes of the IIGS has been its slowness to load programs from a hard disk. With comments such as "Poorer cousin to the Mac" and "slower than running treacle." the IIGS was not exactly going to set the world on fire. Well folks, the wait for a faster loading IIGS is finally over as C.V. Technologies have released a SCSI card that is not only faster that Apple's Hi Speed SCSI but positively runs rings around anything else on the market.
ENTER RAMFAST/SCSI CARD!!!!!!
The actual card comes packed in static proof bag together with 23 page manual that makes installation extremely simple. On the card is a set of dip switches controlling functions such as: Machine Type (IIe or IIGS), DMA Compatibility, IIGS Motherboard Type and Rom Disk Disable. As the necessary software is contained within a Rom Disk, a dip switch is provided to bypass the startup configuration each time you boot-up. The manual recommends that before the RAMFAST card is installed any data located on your hard disk be backed up. However, patience not being one of my virtues I just dived in boots and all and was rewarded with an incredible boot time (more about that later).
"How does it work?" one might ask. Well the card uses a combination of a processor running at 10mHz and caching techniques that relieve the burden of disk I/O from the Apple CPU. All that is necessary is for the code on the Apple to tell the Ramfast what data it wants and where it wants it put and the Ramfast completes the task. In addition
to this the most recently acquired data is held in its cache memory, from where it is accessible almost immediately.
It is all very well to speak in technical terms, but what it boils down to in the nitty gritty is how long that favourite game takes to load or that vital information to be arranged. Below are some figures obtained from a non-Transwarped ROM 01 IIGS with a Chinook Ram 4000 populated with 2 meg of ram and a 40 meg Apple hard disk.
Cold boot to finder: 14.7 sec.
Finder to Appleworks 3.0
(with 53 timeout modules) 9.6 sec.
Load Appleworks Data Base file
(135k - 716 entries.) 5.5 sec.
When you consider that in using an Apple SCSI card (non hi-speed) booting to finder from a cold start used to take 48 seconds this is one infinite improvement. Further improvements to the above times in the order of 25% could be obtained using Transwarp GS.
Some of the other features incorporated in Ramfast are support for the older SASI disks such as Sider D2, D4 and
D4T. 256k of dedicated memory, 1mb/second transfer rate, support for 8 drives/partitions simultaneously, true 1:1 interleave and a lifetime guarantee for the original purchaser.
As an on going commitment to the Ram Fast/SCSI card C.V. Technologies plan future enhancements including support for CD Rom disks and tape drives. I have no doubt that this card will have a major impact on most IIGS owners as well as owners of Apple IIes.
Over the past two months it has been my pleasure to use this remarkable card on my IIGS. Those of you who know me, know that I am not given to over exaggeration, however, this card has changed the way I use my IIGS in an immense fashion. For the princely sum of US$229.00 I believe it to be a good investment. However, through the mail-order places in the US it can be had for as little as US$179.95 a truly great bargain.

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