ISTR we were getting at least 2MB/sec (maybe even up to about 4MB/sec) when nothing else was happening. But as has been said, there's no DMA controller in the empeg and so it's all done by steam.

The SA1110 had some more bits that could be twiddled to shorten IO cycles on external devices which meant we got more like 6MB/sec, but the SA1100 in the empeg lacks this. The PXA255 (successor to the StrongARM line) manages more along the lines of 10MB/sec and also has support for external DMA.

Later chips with built in ATAPI interfaces can pretty much saturate the disk drive - 30+ MB/sec.

Hugo