And the MacBench results are in:
Internal CF drive is nearly twice as fast as CF in PCMCIA adapter (cardbus enabled);
Internal CF drive is overall marginally slower than conventional HD, but dramatically faster on some operations;
603ev is marginally faster running from CF (e.g., floating point gains 4%) at same software settings.
On the whole, it seems that slightly better overall or average disk performance is possible with a conventional hard drive (even a slow one) than the CF card presently installed. This situation may, of course, be improved with a faster CF card (mine dates from c.2004). This relative loss for me is offset by about a 25% improvement in battery life, and by the fact that some tests are hugely better — which of them echoes what I mostly do on an old computer I don't know. The fact is, however, that the machine "feels" very, very snappy with the CF card internally, and so I've no regrets.
Internal CF drive is nearly twice as fast as CF in PCMCIA adapter (cardbus enabled);
Internal CF drive is overall marginally slower than conventional HD, but dramatically faster on some operations;
603ev is marginally faster running from CF (e.g., floating point gains 4%) at same software settings.
On the whole, it seems that slightly better overall or average disk performance is possible with a conventional hard drive (even a slow one) than the CF card presently installed. This situation may, of course, be improved with a faster CF card (mine dates from c.2004). This relative loss for me is offset by about a 25% improvement in battery life, and by the fact that some tests are hugely better — which of them echoes what I mostly do on an old computer I don't know. The fact is, however, that the machine "feels" very, very snappy with the CF card internally, and so I've no regrets.