Understanding Feeds/Speeds and chip load

Last week I was doing about 70 inch a minute on my belt drive OX, 2mm 1flute bit at 18000 rpm in MDF.
100"/min is not impossible, I do that when cutting insulation foam.

 

I run at 2500mm/min (100 ipm) on wood and plastics all the time. With a ball nose I am doing about twice that fast.

 

which drive, on what machine, belt or screw, what controller and what drivers?

 

You need to know your microstepping, belt pitch, pulley size, etc... RepRap Calculator - Prusa Printers

Mathematical formula here: gnea/grbl

 

My guess is that the documentation for the drivers will tell you how to set the DIP switches for microstepping.

without the actual drive (google shows me about 3 different models of TB6600 driver) and the documentation it is possible to figure it out by experiment.
if you set steps/mm to 1 then the motor moves 1 step for every mm you tell it to move.
a 200 step per rev motor at 8x microstepping will do 1600 steps for a revolution, so telling it to move 1600mm you would see it do one revolution.
if you tell it to move 1600mm but it only does half a rev, then microsteps must be 16x.

Generally then, steps for 1 rev / 200 = microstep setting (assuming a 200 step per rev motor, these are common, but 400 and others do exist)