i need everyone to help me in looking for this: audition 4?

[Pat the Cat]

Most certainly, do NOT DEPEND ON HARD DRIVES.

The solid state technology is here. Use it. Some of this stuff should be good for storing records for over a century, more so on SD cards than USB.

Sooner or later, the drives with moving parts will stop spinning. Friction. For a 2 gig drive to have lasted is a damn fine innings, but it's time is near, by the sound of it.

Either that or the terminator is loose, but you get my drift - backup to solid state tech, and run from different solid state tech, and your Amiga is a LOT more reliable. And should stay that way a lot longer too.

[Pat the Cat]

Not necessarily true. In fact given solid state hardware limited times it can be written to, I'm more inclined to trust hard drives for important back ups.
They're also safer when it comes to recovering data when things go bad.
With solid state there's the risk of corrupt media meaning data is gone for good. With magnetic media there's more you can do should things go bad.

There's also the fact that controllers are limiting speed on the Amiga, so there's little performance to gain.

Well, I disagree. For two main reasons. First, you can write protect an SD card. Second, SD cards do not have issues with local magnetic fields, or earthquakes, which is kind of of an issue if you live in certain parts of the world like Sacramento.

It's true that SD cards won't work to full speed connected to most Amigas, and the actual speed you can get get is throttled badly with some SCSI stuff because it's limited to asynchronous mode. To about 2.5 MB/S.

You can get maybe 16 and some out of some arrangements on IDE, and I think the ceiling is about 20 MB/S. Maybe some ultra fast and wide arrangements can go faster again, but I think there's a limit to the throughput of any sort of native Amiga interface. More so on GVP, maybe, but it's not the worst either. I've no idea what the OP's machine is really like, from the post anyway.

How well the Amiga controller handles solid-state storage is an issue. That's true.

[Pat the Cat]

I've heard of a few Amiga users getting 30-40MB/s with some of the ultra-rare and pricey controllers. 5-10 is probably closer to the theoretical limit for the "average joe", and much less for most GVP hardware. OP states that he has "a GVP controller", but no actual details such as the model number or ROM version.

In any case, throughput maximums for GVP hardware are a quantifiable number, all published here:

http://babel.de/amiga.html

Enjoy!

Yeah, I'm kind of limited on controller speed. Got a choice of either Squirrel into A1200 or A570 into an A500. They're both kind of "meh". 16 bit access, so I'll be transfer limited at the lower end. Both are vanilla anyway, and need a little attention.

Until I maybe get get a Terriblefile A500 accelerator built, with a working IDE port. That might go faster than either SCSI option, with regard to solid state media. We'll see how that pans out.

[Pat the Cat]

To this person who saw my posting, the hard drive you are talking about is only 1/2" tell or 3/4". It is a scsi 2 hard drive. it is a western digital hard drive 2.1 Gb in size.

What he's advising you to do is get an extra interface that can plug into the SCSI ribbon cable, alongside your existing hard drives, to mount an SD card into, for use as a drive.

You might need a different SCSI ribbon cable with extra connectors, but it should work fine alongside your existing drives - you can have up to 7 devices on a SCSI bus system, be they drives, or scanners, or even printers. Or even controllers plugged into different computers, if you want a very local, pretty local fast file transfer. The last one is really a stop gap measure, but can sometimes work between Amigas, even if they have different kinds of SCSI controllers.

You don't really need to put memory on the GVP 2091 SCSI controller card (or a Commodore A2091 either) if you are running a 68040 - the system should work best if the 68040 has the memory to it. GVP did do 68040 cards with onboard SCSI, and they go a lot faster than either versions of the A2091. They also did A4000 only accelerators, and their cards can fit most types of Amiga that came with a floppy, one way or another.

How wide is the SCSI cables? 50 connections, sort of a good 2-3 inches across is typical for a cable plugged into into a GVP. Although your drives might be connected to a SCSI controller somehow wired to the 68040, but it doesn't sound like it in your case. Most GVP cards are just SCSI controllers. Some are both SCSI and 68040.

The nice thing about SD cards is, you can copy files to them to backup your hard drives. And you can use them AS hard drives, only they use much less power, so you actually save money from using them compared to hard drives, in the long run.

Now, you can't quite swap them SD cards straight out of a SCSI adaptor. But you should be able to hot plug them in OK, to such a connection.

And if you setup the adaptor right, you can plug different cards into the same place, from outside of the machine. Easier on a big box Amiga. But it can be done.

The really nice thing about SD cards is, you can write protect them, just like floppies.

Pain in the ass to setup in the first place, but worth it.

[Pat the Cat]

Could a mod merge these 2 threads please?

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=71799