I think I've been reasonably serious about my SWARM and despite issues
elsewhere the onboard PATA interface is a part of the system I've never
had any with. Yes, it's limited to PIO 3, but it's not a big deal, that's
still 11MB/s (and one of the 4 generic data movers present in the SoC
If you measure it with something like 'hdparm -t', the real speed figures
in the PIO modes would disappoint you. It's usually more like 3 MB/s even in
PIO4...
Well, various factors contribute to actual figures possible to achieve,
the physical medium transfer speed being an important one.
That 11MB/s
throughput is the maximum you can ever get on the wire in PIO 3, assuming
data is already available to transfer and IORDY is asserted right away
every cycle.
Maciej