A1200 PATA EIDE hard drive?

[Franko]

Franko:

So the drive works!  You must've had back luck too with the large drives being the DOA ones.  Order this 298GB WD model brand new, and with a little luck this time your drive will be intact and will work for your A1200.  Then if you compress some of that enormous data, such as the CD and DVD images, perhaps that'd be ample size for you too.  I think they are discontinuing this model, however, as I got it at clearance half-price.  But there are probably some available still.  I saw it on Vesalia recently.

Cheers Mizar, I'll try and order one today, kinda came to the conclusion that those two disks were DOA after checking through all the specs & technical details there is no real reason that they shouldn't have worked...

298GB will be plenty for my other A1200s as I only need the towered one with it's two 500GB HDs to backup my DVDs and CD ISO files. All my other miggies only contain Amiga specific stuff so 298GB will more than do...

[Franko]

@ Mizar

If you use either the 4xEDIE or the FASTATA MKIII buffered interface boards they automatically split the first part of you HDs up into 4GB partitions that use up 8 x 4GBs worth of space...

However on my 500GB Drives I use SmartFileSystem and once installed on the HDs RDB you can use any size of HD and any size of Partition...

I Only use FFS partitions in the first 4GB space on the Master HD to boot up into OS3.1, OS3.5 or OS4.0 ...

[Franko]

@ Mizar

I've only seen them on eBay these days, I've bought two 4xEIDE boards on eBay over the past few weeks, they only speed up HD access slightly to about 250kb/sc but they make managing an HD and adding extra drives HD/CD/DVD a doddle...

The best board though is the FastATA MKIII, but again you'd have to find one on somewhere like eBay but the FastATA  MKIII will take you're HD speeds up to around 500 to 600kb/sec (depending on your processor), I've only seen one in the past month on eBay but got outbid on it...

SmartFileSystem used to be on AmiNet as it was released into the public domain years ago by the author, however you can still find it here at the authors own website...

SmartFileSystem Ver 1.279

OS4.0 on an A1200 requires a PPC accelerator but without an RTG board as well it's slower than a dead donkey...