#BlitzDisk
29 messages in this thread
Cheath,
I just got my FastFonts/BlitzDisk a couple of days ago. If you are
Keeping track of such things, BlitzDisk seems to work fine with the Xebec hard
drive.
Does the DIRONLY flag effect EVERYTHING? It can't be set to work ONLY
on a HARD DRIVE, without also effecting the floppys? It doesn't look like it.
I LIKE BlitzDisk! Very useful for about 2K!
Keep up the good work.
p.s. When should we begin to hear about TxEd's upgrade?
Lloyd
Good to hear BlitzDisk is working with the XEBEC hard drive –
let me know of anything suspicious, even if you're not sure
of the cause.
.
I'm thinking about what I could add to BlitzDisk if I decide
to spiffy it up a bit. Configuring each drive for clipping
limits etc would be useful particularly with combining hard drive
and floppy. I'm thinking about a new inexpensive package including
BlitzDisk, need to project better results than we got with FastFonts
to make it practical though. If we do that I'll probably work
on enhancing BlitzDisk for better configuring, and try to make
reading directories faster the first time before the blocks
all get into the cache.
.
TxEd Plus upgrade notices should go out end of next week, for
sure… I wanted to get the manual off to printer before sending
out the notices, and have been delayed by ARP V1.1 release, BlitzDisk
and hollidays … but the coast is clear now, a couple more passes
through the docs and over the code to make sure we haven't left
out any important features should do it.
…cheath
cheath,
Please sell BlitzDisk seperately, or give it away, or whatever. I don't
have FastFonts, and don't want FastFonts, but I do want BlitzDisk. But, if I
have to buy FastFonts to get it, I'll live without it.
I'm not going to give it away … that wouldn't be fair to ASDG,
since it would wipe out their market. I'm looking into a new
product, which'll have to wait until after I get TxEd Plus
out, and a few other things C-:
…cheath
I really wasn't serious about giving it away. It's a needed tool, has enough
value to sell, but not enough value for me to have to buy an unwanted product
to get it!
Well, put it this way; for now you can get BlitzDisk for $39.95
plus a letter and a couple weeks delay.
.
We're likely to make the same kind of offer later for owners
of any package we might put together with BlitzDisk. We have a
loyal customer base that I know will be interested in any new
things we might offer, so I can offer things to them without
going to the full expense of a commercial release (IE about $10K
and a couple months of my time). And I like giving them an
opportunity to have new things first. When you buy a Microsmiths
product, you get an opportunity to get new things from us
later, for a lower price, and before other Amigans would be
able to get the new things.
…cheath
Charlie, you'll never make it in business if you are worried about wiping out
competitors. All the most successful Amiga companies believe in marketing
warfare. Ah, by the way. I finally wrote that article on software pricing.
It walks through an example one-product software company, discusses production
costs, distribution costs, and explains why software has a certain minimum
price, and why the producer of a $50 product gets $15, and everybody else gets
about $30. I have submitted it to INFO magazine, and if it doesn't run there,
I might put it in Amigo Times.
Did TxEd really wipe out the low-cost editors? I think I've seen a few, but
none with any vestige of marketing. I think they try to stick in the kitchen
sink, and make it macro-happy. Saying TxEd "wiped out" a market is a bit
subjective… maybe *no one* can make money in that price range, on that kind
of product.
Speaking of which, how much will the upgrade to Plus be for us present TxEd
owners? Marlene
Not sure yet – I need to get the quote back on doing the manuals.
It will be less than the difference in suggested retail price
( $39.95 ), but I'm not sure how much less yet.
…cheath
Thanks Charlie. Marlene
Cheath,
Just got the BlitzDisk update also, and am impressed so far. Only real
complaint is the limitation of two device drivers to hook – I'd like to be able
to add a third (hddisk.device, jdisk.device, and trackdisk.device), but had to
leave off the third – don't use floppies that much anyway.
I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that BlitzDisk WILL work with
saf-T-net despite your warnings to the contrary, as long as I'm not caching
trackdisk. Don't know yet if your caching will interfere with my floppy access,
though. I'll have to give it a try one of these days and report back.
Thanks for the good product and customer support; it's appreciated!
..Bob
Ah, good to hear that you can use BlitzDisk with jdisk.device …
I don't have a BridgeBoard set up so I couldn't try it.
.
I put in the warning for turning off BlitzDisk when you use
special backup programs after we got a report of a GURU running
with HardHat – I don't have HardHat so I'm not sure what happened,
but probably HardHat does direct to the device driver and makes
different assumptions. So just to be safe, I decided to put the
warning in for all backup programs, so you'll be 100% sure not
to find some obsure interaction problem when you're trying to
create an archive backup.
…cheath
With the length of time HardHat takes to do a backup, I think the most likely
cause of a GURU is statistical probability.
Regards, Larry.
(grin) Don't know much about HardHat. I'm hoping to be able
to use my two HD's to do cross-backups … I've got a CLTD SCSI
drive on my A1000, and a 2090 card on my A2000 … so it would
seem I should be able to plug the CLTD drive into the 2090 card
and copy things back and forth. But I'm not sure if the two
formats will work together … I hope so, but there's no real
standard for the physical storage specs now.
…cheath
Cheath,
That should work just fine on the SCSI drives. Just in case anyone else is
thinking about doing this with ST506 devices, I'd better point out a small
caveat. When you format a drive, the clock bits, sector headers, etc., are
written at a particular rate, and that rate is dependent upon the controller
itself. (this is a low level format I refer to).
The problem comes when you take that drive and attach it to a different
controller. The controller may have slightly different characteristics,
especially in terms of clock speed, and you may find it generating errors. Note
that this applies to ST506 drives, and to the SCSI <-> ST506 adapter found in
SCSI drives. The C Ltd. and 2090 'controllers' are really just host adapters,
and have no bearing on the data frequency at the drive itself.
Currently I am backing up to another 20 meg drive on the same controller. Makes
for nice, fast backups.
Regards, Larry.
I'm thinking of some of the software protoculs that people are adding to drives
so they can "automount", by allocating a few sectors in the header to control
partitions. Hopefully these drives would still at least be explicitly
Mountable with a different partition setup.
Ahh…
That could be a problem Cheath.. thing is, cylinder 0 is a natural for
placing drive information, as all controllers can read that area regardless of
the total capacity of the drive.
Regards, Larry.
Yup … just hope the driver writers agree to conventions, and keep the sectors
physically the same (IE no upside down sectors to use faster movem loops etc)
Charlie, that would be a problem, and I too would hope that the data was stored
where aAmigados put it, and in the same order.
Regards, Larry.
Charlie,
I'm not sure that that approach will work, unless you set up your CLtd SCSI
drive with two partitions, leaving the first partition untouched on the 1000.
The 2090 driver (hddisk.device) uses the first two cylinders as a separate
partition, which is used by the 'prep' command, and which allows the first SCSI
drive on the 2090 (and the ST506 drives) to auto-mount with the BindDrivers.
I was successful in connecting my old CLtd SCSI drive to the 2090, but I
didn't need to keep the old format, so I just re-built the partitions the way
that hddisk.device needs them. (My drive is one of the early Rodime drives
that CLtd was originally shipping).
Of course, IMHO, saf-T-net would provide a much easier solution to the backup
process, but then I'm just a bit prejudiced. <grin>
..Bob
I'm going to need to re-partition the CLTD anyhow, just recently got it back
from the shop with a new drive mechanism and formatted as a single partition.
I'm not looking forward to the full backup though … probably will have to
wait till after TxEd Plus release… then I'll try a format with two tracks
reserved. Guess I should PREP it first, then bring it back to the A1000.
Cheath:
Your statement about running prep and then moving the drive to the A1K
brings up questions. What are you doing? Are you trying to use the same drive
on both machines? I think that may have been the discussion I noted earlier.
I am somewhat interested in how that works out. It might be useful for me to
be able to run my micropolis on both machines.
I presume that you are running prep on the 2K and then partitioning
clys 2 -> max on the 1K. Should be interesting, I hope it works.
73, bill
That's what I want to do – prep the drive on the A2000 controller,
then switch back to using it with a manual mountlist on the A1000.
Then I can avoid some of the 15-disk mania when doing backups – just
swap machines, and keep a backup of each drive on the other drive,
at least for the semi-volatile stuff. Hope it works – I should
be trying it in the next "day" or so. (I've said that before
lately…)
…cheath
Cheath:
Yea, I hear ya! Well gud luk and let the rest of us know how it works
out. 73, bill
P.S. How come I can't find any dealers here in San Diego carring MicoSmiths
software?
Charlie,
Guess I have to retract my previous statement about BlitzDisk working with
jdisk.device – turns out I started getting many read/write errors walking a
large directory on my jdisk-ed hard disk (first using the ARP file requester,
but later repeatable with other directory programs). The problem(s) went away
after terminating BlitzDisk. Speculating, I'd suspect that there's some
strange timing requirements that are getting thrown off by BlitzDisk's
intercepting of the i/o requests. Too bad, cause I was hoping that it would
work with that hard drive also.
The program works great with a SCSI drive connected to the 2090, though.
I did a preliminary test with saf-T-net, backing up a single directory from
my (cached) SCSI drive, with caching also enabled for trackdisk.device, and did
not encounter any problems. The results are not substantial enough to
guarentee that folks won't encounter any problems, but are encouraging. If
only I had enough time (and disks) to do full backups/restores and really test
out the sucker (I'd need two backups and _hopefully_ one full restore), but I
don't have 3 hours of downtime available for that drive right now. Hopefully
later this week I'll be able to find the time.
..Bob
OK, I'll put jdisk on the `user beware' list. Thanks for the
report … I'd like to see how jdisk works if I ever get a
BridgeBoard.
…cheath