Question is if your delays are being caused by seek times or throughput limits of the PCMCIA (=ISA) bus and 80186 CPU. SRAM can be faster than flash in terms of seek times, but flash is still plenty fast for most purposes, so I'd be surprised if that's the bottleneck.

However fast the storage medium is, it still needs to make it through the ISA bus, and it needs processing. ISA+186 is going to be slow whatever medium you put in there. I strongly doubt you'd notice any theoretical improvement whatever medium you use.

dionb wrote on 2024-10-30, 14:11:

Question is if your delays are being caused by seek times or throughput limits of the PCMCIA (=ISA) bus and 80186 CPU. SRAM can be faster than flash in terms of seek times, but flash is still plenty fast for most purposes, so I'd be surprised if that's the bottleneck.

However fast the storage medium is, it still needs to make it through the ISA bus, and it needs processing. ISA+186 is going to be slow whatever medium you put in there. I strongly doubt you'd notice any theoretical improvement whatever medium you use.

Thanks! So…even larger internal RAM upgrade may be the way to go, I guess?

InstantComet wrote on 2024-10-30, 14:23:

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Thanks! So…even larger internal RAM upgrade may be the way to go, I guess?

Can't be 100% sure as don't have anything approaching that amazing little device you have there - but judging by my 8086 / V30 turbo XT (which should be very close in terms of bus speeds and CPU power) it's going to be CPU and bus bottleneck all the way.

InstantComet wrote on 2024-10-30, 13:44:

However, I can't help noticing the time difference of opening filer between with and without CF card in the PCMCIA slot.Currently, I have a Sandisk 256MB Compact flash card with adapter in the PCMCIA slot. I would take 7-8 seconds for the filer to load. I tried switching to a 128MB Compact flash card but the waiting time is roughly the same. After installing a 16MB RAM upgrade, I migrate almost everything to the RAM disk and the filer only take 2 seconds to load.

7-8 seconds is normal for first start of filer, with such big card. Close it, open it again and you will see it opens almost instantly. After you put 200LX to sleep, or remove and reinsert the card, then this delay will repeat. It is because CF card is removable drive and 200LX needs to reread it again after each removal or sleep.

You can see the same behavior wit "dir" command in dos.

There is utility named NODELAY which will make 200LX think that the CF card is non-removable drive and then the delay will occur only once after each reboot. But if you use NODELAY, do not remove the card and change it contents somewhere else without rebooting 200LX first, or bad things will happen.

And I forgot to mention where you find NODELAY and many other useful programs for 200LX: http://hplx.pgdn.de/

rasva wrote on 2024-10-30, 19:23:

And I forgot to mention where you find NODELAY and many other useful programs for 200LX: http://hplx.pgdn.de/

Thanks a lot! Had looked into no delay before, but since I use the pcmcia slot for file transfer, it is not that suitable. Still, many thanks.