> All of the hpcmips machines have a severe limitation.  They are all,
> afaik, 16-bit PC Card devices.  Without DMA.  This means that you are
> limited to the PIO modes, which tops out somewhere near 1MB/s or
> worse.  Many of the new ultra cards are able to cruse at 10x-20x this
> in a CardBus slot on a machine with a good DMA engine...

I wasn't aware of that, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, it's a
speed limitation, but with the bottleneck at the CPU there are very few
things that disc access speed will directly impact before the CPU and RAM
tops out. 

This is purely anecdotal, but I've always suspected that Windows CE devices
are hobbled by low cost chipsets which are ultimately very slow. Even on my
Psion NetBook Pro, which runs a 400MHz PXA-255 and 128MBs of RAM its slow
when accessing volumes, loading large files, and working with interface
connections.

I know from information from ARM-based RISC system users that even 206MHz
ARM chips aren't slow at all and I suspect they use different chipsets,
though I don't have any direct experience. I don't think the issue is OS
related, either, because I see similar slow behavior in NetBSD.