#Hard Drives
4 messages in this thread
Hi, I'm finaly planing on getting a hard drive. Problem is I
dont know much about putting it together. I have an amiga 2000
with no bridge board. I want a 5.25 drive to fit in the space
the amiga provides for this porpose. Don't know if drive should
be full height or half hight to fit in this space. I'm planning
to get C'ltd controler (if I can find out were to get one), and
a Seagate Drive. I saw 2 that I'm interested in but have no idea
what the terms they use are. One is a ST 277R 65 meg 40 MSEC RLL,
the other is a ST 277N 64 Meg SCSI. Which one if any, can I use
with my Amiga and the C-Ltd controller? Also the add says these
drives are for IBM and IBM compatibles. Can I still use them
without a bridge? Well I guess thats all for now. Your help
would be greatly appreciated.
C/U/L
Bruno
Bruno:
I am sure that others will jump in to help with your questions but to try to
answer a few…… First, if you are going to install a drive in the 5.25 inch
slot then it will have to be a 'half-height' drive. Another possible (and
practical) option for you is to buy a 3. inch hard drive (if you don't have a
second internal 3.5 inch floppy). Of course even if you do, it would not take
much work to make the 3.5 inch drive fit in the 5.25 inch opening (actually
many 3.5 inch HD's have adaptors to allow installation in a standard 5.25 inch
opening).
I don't know what size (full/half height) the 277N drive is but since it is a
SCSI drive there should be no problem using it with the C-LTD controller.
Currently the maximum possible data transfer rates are higher for SCSI than for
RLL however that does not necessarily mean that a particular SCSI drive will
transfer at a faster rate than another drive that is RLL. Was it does mean is
that the fastest SCSI will transfer faster than the fastest RLL type drive. If
you are wanting to do things like real time animation off of the HD then the
premium price for a max speed SCSI is probably worth the difference.
I personally prefer the SCSI over the ST506 type interface on CBM's 2090 but
don't know all of the details of the C-Ltd controller for the 2000.
73, bill
I have a Seagate 277N on my machine at home with a C Ltd. controller. I have
had no problems with it and have been very pleased overall with its
performance. If you do go with this combo however… Let me warn you of a
problems that I had when converting to AmigaDos 1.3. I had had it operating
under 1.2 for a long time without problems and decided to upgrade to 1.3 as
soon as I got it. Unfortunately getting it to work took about 70(!) hours
worth of fooling with the setup.
Problem 1: If you use SEAMAT (a C Ltd program for low level formatting Seagate
drives) don't let the fact that the pointer freezes up right after you run it
frighten you. I thought it was crashing and as a result rebooted many times
when all I really needed to do was let it run for about 3 minutes more and
everything would have been fine. Problem 2: The startup-sequence that comes
with 1.3 performs all of the drive mounting early, then runs another CLI in the
background to perform various stuff and uses a special option on the LoadWB
call that tells the workbench not to start up until it receives a break signal
from the background CLI. THIS WILL NOT WORK (at least with Scsidos 2.0 and the
277N)! Remove the option from the LoadWB call line or else you will open up
the drive icon under workbench and it will get stuck in an infinite loop while
getting the drive's directory.
Bruno,
Either drive may be used. However the ST277R would require and additional
card. My suggestion is the ST277N-0, or the ST277N-1. The -1 is a faster
drive. Both models will serve you well. You don't need a bridge card to operate
any dri=s the Amiga side of the A2000.
Hope this helps.
Fred –