Gotcha. ATA disks have an amount of write cache in RAM, so any contention could be resolved by the disk prioritizing the read operation and accepting the write operation into cache.
My guess is that your CF card has little or no of this kind of cache.
Looking at the CF card you got, my guess is that you could mitigate this getting a better card. Nobody seems to give exact specs here but a better card will overall be less bad in this scenario.
You've probably seen it before but for an overview on this kind of problem, but with SD card storage, there's some good general discussion in here:
There are a couple higher-end CF cards you could look at, but I'll offer the caveat that I haven't used any very high end or new CF cards. Sandisk has some rated at 120 and 160 megabytes/second and I'd go right for that "extreme pro" level, even though you'll never actually get 160 megabytes/second out of it, if it's closer to being able to do, say, 40 for realsies, then you'll be in a way better position.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good way to test any of this, so I can't make any recommendation without the warning that: You might buy the highest-end available CF card and still have problems, even if it ends up doing better on benches. A high end CF card strikes me as an intriguing option for something like, a beige G3 or even a 630 or 5000/6000 series mac, but you're also sort of getting into the realm of this being enough money to justify posting a WTB for an SIL3112 and getting a SATA card and using like a used intel 520 or even a cheap modern SSD.
Incidentally, if you still have those macbench results and have some time, would you mind dropping them somewhere in public on vtools?
My guess is that your CF card has little or no of this kind of cache.
Looking at the CF card you got, my guess is that you could mitigate this getting a better card. Nobody seems to give exact specs here but a better card will overall be less bad in this scenario.
You've probably seen it before but for an overview on this kind of problem, but with SD card storage, there's some good general discussion in here:
There are a couple higher-end CF cards you could look at, but I'll offer the caveat that I haven't used any very high end or new CF cards. Sandisk has some rated at 120 and 160 megabytes/second and I'd go right for that "extreme pro" level, even though you'll never actually get 160 megabytes/second out of it, if it's closer to being able to do, say, 40 for realsies, then you'll be in a way better position.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good way to test any of this, so I can't make any recommendation without the warning that: You might buy the highest-end available CF card and still have problems, even if it ends up doing better on benches. A high end CF card strikes me as an intriguing option for something like, a beige G3 or even a 630 or 5000/6000 series mac, but you're also sort of getting into the realm of this being enough money to justify posting a WTB for an SIL3112 and getting a SATA card and using like a used intel 520 or even a cheap modern SSD.
Incidentally, if you still have those macbench results and have some time, would you mind dropping them somewhere in public on vtools?