Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: FrenchShark on November 23, 2006, 04:02:38 PM
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Hello,
I saw these (not so expensive) products sold by Trenz Electronics :
Disk-on-module (128 MB - 2 GB)
http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/default.php?cPath=34
IDE Flash disks (512 MB - 4 GB)
http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/default.php?cPath=46
What do you think ?
Regards,
Frederic
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What do you think ?
I think you should learn to use the search option. ;-)
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I'm sure I saw a picture in the album with one of these installed in an a1200. I don't remember who posted it though ... :( looks really cool, I thought they were more expensive.
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@ Piru,
In the picture section, I have seen some compact flash modifications and one first generation flash drive add-on.
Not something like these ones.
You seemed to be sceptical about the product life, I am also. But the 15 MB/s transfer rate, the 0ms seek time and the low power consumption is tempting !
Regards,
Frederic
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CF cards are dirt cheap and reliable. you could always buy 3 and occasionally back up to the other two in case of a problem....
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But the 15 MB/s transfer rate
You're not going to get 15 MB/s transfer rate with A1200 IDE.
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You're not going to get 15 MB/s transfer rate with A1200 IDE.
Yes, I know that :(.
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hamtronix wrote:
CF cards are dirt cheap and reliable. you could always buy 3 and occasionally back up to the other two in case of a problem....
You have just reinvented the RAID technique on CF :-D.
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I think you should learn to use the search option. ;-)
There's NOTHING more unfriendly and that makes you not want to not visit a site then when people on a board you've only posted to a couple of times start shouting, "Oh look at the Baron Chatting Noob Stick over there. LOL!"
Something more along the lines of this might not make people feel so stupid,
"Yes, I believe several people on here have tried similar devices. There are several threads you can search for by going into Forums and looking for the search option."
And if people on the site were 'really' nice they might even link to one or more threads for them.
Sorry just a pet peave. If you get tired of the same questions PLEASE just skip the thread or give friendly helpful advice.
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@AmigaHeretic
Thank you for your invaluable contribution to the thread. It really helped.
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What I'd really like to see would be some storage device based on PCM (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2021822,00.asp) memory. Fast writing and unlimited write cycles. That'd be something...
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@ piru
as much as I enjoy your comments and helpful advise, you can be a bit abrubt with people
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Piru,
If you think those were useless posts, your rude posts to search are even more useless.
Maybe in your culture/language it does not come across as rude? But in English it is that and more.
As AmigaHeretic stated, there are more subtle ways to say what you said. :)
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I did a couple of these.
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a1200flash
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a4000flash
Here's a picture of my A1200 with 4GB CF Flash
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1547
And here is czarek's CF installation
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1640
In the original 1200 "mod" I used a 512MB card. I've since moved to a 4GB card. I have also since abandoned the 4000 "mod", mostly due to space issues in the desktop case, but also since my CS MKIII has wide SCSI.
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Show some love to Piru, he's a reservoir of technical knowledge. Peel some grapes and I'm sure he will be more conversational.
:laughing:
I have a SimpleTech 1GB flash drive in my A1200's standard IDE slot and whilst it boots fast, uses little power and makes no noise - with SysInfo it reports a mere 1.5MB/S transfer rate. This is pretty crap. The A1200's IDE port is capable of 2MB/S on an '060 system.
I heard that Compact Flash gradually degrades over time. The size becomes less as it 'self repairs' which is probably not a good thing for a permanent hard drive.
I'm surprised by how slow these flash drives are. Trouble is, battery backed SRAM would be extremely dangerous (just a slight disconnect from the power and your whole drive vanishes - this happened to me a lot on a Philips NiNO palm PC).
I don't think I'll be ditching my 3.5MB/S SCSI-2 hard disk (Asynch mode) completely yet, flash drives aren't ideal as a main multimedia drive. Good for quick booting projects, MP3 players or for gaming though.
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Now i've got seconds thoughts over my order from Ebay the other day; two 2.5" to CF adapters, and two 2Gb CF cards.
Hearing you say that if my cd32 og laptop looses it's power for a mere second the whole drive will be deleted? (!) :(
I might want to invest in a UPS as well then to protect the data (sounds like an ironic investment in the cf-adapters/cards then after all;)
Will use one of them in my CD32+SX32 and one in my C= i486 Laptop..
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kidkoala wrote:
Hearing you say that if my cd32 og laptop looses it's power for a mere second the whole drive will be deleted? (!) :(
Flash memory isn't battery backed-up, so it will hold the data even when the computer loses power. Hyperspeed was referring to a different sort of memory I think, which is faster but needs power to refresh it.
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Piru,
I agree with TjLaSer, be careful how you word replies, (we should all be careful because of the multi national membership of this site) anyone that takes the trouble to view/post on this site deserves to be helped (until they prove themselves unworthy!!)
I use a CF adaptor to copy files downloaded from the internet onto my PC to my Amigas, an excellent and quick way of doing so.
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Piru wrote:
What I'd really like to see would be some storage device based on PCM (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2021822,00.asp) memory. Fast writing and unlimited write cycles. That'd be something...
That looks awesome.
"But we're still years away from seeing these things in products," Doller said. "Will we be selling these? Yes. When will the volume start crossing over and above our current flash output? Probably not until 2010 or so."
So who'll be the first to fit some of this in a classic amiga...? :-)
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Yeah, only the battery backed SRAM cards are dangerous for permanent data (like those PCMCIA cards). If you do want a small 2MB/4MB PCMCIA SRAM card I'd advise going for the Centennial self-recharge brand over the Mitsubishi Melcard (which needs a CR2032 change every now and then and would be more prone to impact-related data loss).
This type of storage method is so fast it can be used as 100ns FastMem whereas a flash drive would be way too slow for random access.
Piru: I don't quite understand what that PCM memory technology is about. Is it simply a hybrid SRAM/Flash fast writing process? If it's made by Intel it will be boycotted!
:-D
Anyway, let's keep this thread going. I'm going to put a flash drive in my CD32 too and I'll try and get benchmarks soon.
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reflex rant/
lol, who/what on Earth do AmigaHeretic et al think they are? The Official Internet-Forum Etiquette Standards Commission, or something? :roll: Nobody wants to hear your whiney opinions on how ppl should and shouldn’t respond to posts, thank you guys.
You better get used to Piru’s abrupt responses sometimes, because that’s just the way he is. People respond to things in different ways - it’s called having an individual personality – and nobody was attacking anybody personally. Funniest thing is that the response didn’t seem to bother FrenchShark himself in the SLIGHTEST - was like water off a duck's back to him (probably because he’s French (?) and they’re the masters of abruptness ;) Yet these guys felt the need to be offended on his behalf. :lol:
The words: interfering busy and bodies, spring to mind
:ranting: /rant over
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well I was talking about using cf-cards for booting from and storing data, like a hd, not for mem. use, of course.
it is said that the ide-bus in the 600 is @1,5MB/sec., but due to something, it's only capable of about half of that.
so cf-cards are more than fast enough, you don't need a 150x card, though big cards tend to be fast as well..
..and they are reliable, light, don't make noise etc.
I'm planning on buying the 4way IDE-bus and connecting two cf-adapters to it, making one of them accessible from outside in a custom-made slot to make transfers on cf from pc easy and swift (would look pretty sweet to:).
off topic: right now i'm having trouble with my a2000-keyboard that's connected to my aux-port on the cd32, it worked when i first installed os3.9 but now it doesn't at all; anyone?? (and remember i can't write commandos in cli to check if it's up or something, only mouseclicks;)
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If the Tandem in my 2000 was bootable, I would consider putting a CF drive in the box.
Though, I have a Blizzard 2060 which has (from what I have read) the fastest SCSI interface available for the 2000. It's narrow, but there's a plethora of 50-68 adapters around. For that matter, I'm curious to try one of the narrow SCSI to IDE (or SATA) converters -- sure, they're US$70 or so, but aren't hobbies supposed to be expensive?
Hey, Piru... is there a *major* concern over AmigaOS versus the expected life-span of a CF card?
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a couple of interesting notes about cf-cards:
lifespan:
flash memory supports only a limited number of Erase/Write cycles (about 300,000) before a particular "sector" can no longer be written. Typically the controller in a CompactFlash attempts to prevent premature wearout of a sector by mapping the writes to various other sectors in the card - a process referred to as wear leveling.
prices and fraud:
Compact Flash memory is not inexpensive and as such counterfeiting has become a problem. CF cards available at exceptionally low prices (particularly from online merchants, which call for return-shipping for any chance at a refund) should be viewed with skepticism. See http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1029509288
Look at the Edge Stamp
Lexar, SanDisk, Toshiba and others stamp or engrave a series number onto the edge or rear of the card. The photo below shows the edge stamp from an older Lexar CompactFlash card.
Look at the Label
Some companies attach a label to the card that contains the series number, or print it right on the main label.
Look at the Internal Name
You may also see this or similar identifying information for both CompactFlash and SD in the file setupapi.log in the WINDOWS directory on the C: drive of a typical Windows XP installation
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Well, for transferring from PC to Amiga they're a great idea. In fact you might be able to get a PCMCIA adaptor for the A600 to use compact flash cards (you might not need another IDE port).
I'm just wondering why people pick the compact flash card though and not SmartMedia, SD, XD or Memory Stick. Is it due to Aminet drivers?
Another advantage of solid state is that they don't need that much juice. A heavily expanded desktop unit could have trouble with external scandoublers, accelerators and a motorised hard disk - particularly when a PPC/BVision comes into things. They won't get bearing failure or overheat either.
Right now my Simpletech 1GB 2.5" (A1200 IDE) flash disk is reporting a SysInfo 'SPEED in BYTES/SEC: 1,077,304'. Not sure whether Fast File System slows down this benchmark but I have noticed the speed results lower as the drive fills up.
(http://www.mpi.ch/images/000003ba.JPG)
A Quantum Fireball 2GB 3.5" (SCSI-IV - ASynch) hard disk is reporting a SysInfo 'SPEED in BYTES/SEC: 3,419,269'. For multimedia or general DOpus file management this 3½ increase is very noticeable.
For main system use I found the 2MB/S rate of a 2.5" hard disk pretty slow so half this again and you can see a definite niche area of use for a flash drive.
The Amiga could make good use of such a drive but can you imagine using a Linux swapfile or Windows virtual memory on something this speed? You'd pull your hair out!
EDIT:
After reading the SSD Buyer's Guide (http://www.storagesearch.com/2004-archived-ssdbyuersguide.html) I'm puzzled why I'm only getting 1MB/S. Maybe it's something to do with PIO Mode-0/1/2 or Mask/MaxTransfer.
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i cannot use a pcmcia-cd solution since i have a pcmcia-ethernetcard connectet to it at all times, that's why a 4way ide-adapter might be a good solution.
and absolutely the low poser consumption of the cf is of great benefit, both my machines are higly upgraded and are in need of more power..
yes, as you state in your edit, it leads to the thought that i think a modern cf-card can match most classic amiga ide and scsi-bus's (maybe not the 3000, 4000?).
for me it's surely good enough since the a600 ide-bus is so slow, but I eagerly await to benchmark the cf-card on the cd32's
ide-bus (i guess it's about the same as in a 1200's ide-bus?).
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by kidkoala:
for me it's surely good enough since the a600 ide-bus is so slow, but I eagerly await to benchmark the cf-card on the cd32's ide-bus (i guess it's about the same as in a 1200's ide-bus?).
It should be the same, the chip in the SX32 is supposed to replicate the A1200 features exactly ('Harry' I think it's called).
I would recommend one of those Simpletech drives though, they are slimline and have screws to go straight onto an A600/A1200 cradle or indeed the SX32's PCB.
Someone here on Amiga.org mentioned a 60GB 1.8" hard disk too which sounds really interesting!
Keep the ribbon short though, the SX32 docs say it is buffered but I've read about problems with longer ribbons to external drives. Ideally the A600/A1200 ribbon to the IDE header should be no longer than 2"/5cm.
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Ok, nice to know about "Harry", hehe, one more in the c= chip-family...
about the 1.8" I know that you get these micro-hd's which fit right into the cf-slots, but these are actually just 1", you even get 0,85" drives that are the same (not memory cards, but drives. the 1" ones are also suprisingly cheap, you them @40$ on ebay for a 5gb.. (!) --->
"The Microdrive is a brand name for a miniature 1-inch hard disk designed to fit in a Compact Flash (CF) Type II slot. The release of similar drives by other makers has led to them often being referred to as 'microdrives'. However, 'microdrive' is not a genericized trademark and manufacturers other than IBM up to 2003 and Hitachi after do not officially refer to these drives as Microdrives. Some other companies, such as Sony, have licensed the name and sell re-branded versions.
These drives fit into any CompactFlash II slot; however, they may take more power than flash memory (up to 500 mA) and therefore may not work in some low-power devices (e.g. handheld computers). Nevertheless, they have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way data is stored and manipulated. Microdrives which can store 4 GB or more must be formatted for a file system which supports this capacity, such as FAT 32 or NTFS, which may not be supported by older CompactFlash hosts."
here's some specs. on a hitachi-drive:
Microdrive 3K6
Feature/Function
Benefits
Capacity
6GB maximum capacity
* 6000 digital photos (1MB each)
* 1.5 hours DV-quality MPEG-2 video, or
8 hours MPEG-4 video
* 1,500 - 3000 songs
Size
42.8 x 36.4 x 5.0 mm
16g
High-capacity, portable storage in a package the size
of a matchbook.
Reliability
200G operating shock
2000G non-operating shock
Exceptional ruggedness to withstand tougher
handling and improve portability
Interface
CF+ Type II
IDE
Flexibility to support embedded or removable designs
Performance
Sustained data rate up to 9.4MB/sec
30% better than prior generation
if the sx32 ide-bus is buffered, does that mean it is faster than the plain 600 bus? my ide-cable for the 600 is the 5cm type, i just didn't know that some of the reason is that it might give your trouble if it was longer..
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/rant on
@dillinger
OK well if we have to get used to abrubt responses then we shall all do it and resort to being a lame PC forum! How fun would that be. Then we can all get banned like Doomy!
/rant off
back to the topic at hang
How effective are those 2.5" IDE Flash drives? They look neat!
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read through the topic once more and you'll be enlightened i think :)
they are a few mb/sec. but they are limited to a few hundred thousand reads/writes before they can't be used anymore. meaning, i think, that a bigger drive, will last longer, because the filesystem will use those areas on the drive first, that are least used.
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I'm still evaluating this Simpletech 1GB 2.5" flash drive. According to some technical data the write life can be 2,000,000 with the internal protection that stops the same block being written to.
The advantage of this 2.5" fixing drive over Compact Flash appears to be that it doesn't need an adaptor, just a small ribbon. It also has industrial temperature, shock and humidity resistance so will carry on functioning in all conditions (whereas dropping a laptop say with a platter drive would be nasty). A compact flash card would be rated at domestic/commercial use which would mean less resistance to heat and impact. This is a major advantage if you want to put your A1200 into a tank or maybe a space shuttle.
:idea:
I'm surprised those microdrives suck out up to 500mA, A CD32 power brick only allows for 2,200mA. Cutting it fine if you have an SX32 and the trimmings.
The drive someone on another thread was talking about is a 1.8" 60GB drive - that may be the thing used in an iPod. It's for an IDE port not a CF adaptor.
I'm going to fiddle with this Simpletech flash drive a bit more before giving a final verdict but I must say it is a little bit surreal watching an Amiga booting in 15-20 seconds completely silent. It's almost like a poltergeist has taken over it...
:-D
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I use a 20gig 1.8" hard drive in my amiga 1200 and too tell you the truth it is super silent and fast. so never wanted a flashdrive after i bought that one ,
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i will also look into the 1.8" disk matter.
when i've tested the flash-cards i've ordered, i might also test a 1.8" drive, then if that's better than cf, i'll use the cf for transport between pc and amiga, and the 1.8" to boot from.
@adonay
what kind of adapter did you use, how much did the disk and adaptor cost?
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I just had a thought... The limitation of CF cards is write/erase... What about read cycles? Does that affect the lifespan of a CF card? And, does any writing actually occur on the Workbench partition/drive during the boot process? Would Workbench come up if the drive was write-protected?
I've used one of these in my A4K before and saw a nice drop in boot time as a result. I took it out because it didn't like having a slave device on the IDE channel. But it wouldn't be so bad using SCSI hard drives for apps and such, and simply booting from a CF card on the IDE channel.
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I think what everyone was talking about in regurads to a previous post was my lil Drive in a A4000T:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1201
This is a 40-pin version, but they make a 44-pin job as well. A lot smaller and less heat then the one that has the looks of a 2.5" drive AND they also go up to 4-gig in size... :-D
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@j-golden
wow that's a cool drive, how many inches? :) thought size doesn't really matter ;) is it costy? ..another medium to consider, makes me confused! hehe
@dr_righteous
they are not affected by reading, only the write/erase process, so that's a good thing.
about the boot-up, the only thing i can think of that would be faster than a hdd, is spin-up, the cards don't have spin-up time and similar things that take time at startup.
not sure about read/write times though..will check that out
this great cf comparison says that the fastest cards (sandisk's cards) have about 6MB/sec. write and 5MB/sec. read-speeds.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-7699
looking at this chart from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_memory_cards
it says that (i guess that's theoretical speed) cf cards sport 40MB/sec. bot in reading and writing.
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kidkoala wrote:
@j-golden
wow that's a cool drive, how many inches? :) thought size doesn't really matter ;) is it costy? ..another medium to consider, makes me confused! hehe
If you read the conversation under the pic, you'll find the lead to the info you need. The down side is I don't know how to order these. I ordered mine through a friend that works for Simpletech.
I remember it not being all that cheap. The main info is that it has a burst write speed of 20Mb a second (not that the Amiga could do that) and standard 5Mb read/write.
The other interesting thing is that they make them leaning to the left (like mine) leaning to the right or standing strait up depending on your needs.
*EDIT*
Just tried to find the info myself and came up goose egg. They may not make these any more :(
*EDIT EDIT*
Just did an ehaustive search and found the correct part # to google. If you are really into this drive and it's types, do a search for : SLFDM40LPV
That's the 40-pin version, but where they sell the 40-pin, they'll also have the 44-pin. becareful not to get a Vert. one... :rtfm:
Oh, and here is you tech sheet:
http://www.psism.com/simpleflashdiskmodule.pdf
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what kind of adapter did you use, how much did the disk and adaptor cost?
mine uses no adaptor as it is 44pin ide and plug in like usual hd only diff is that it is super small.. about half the size and the noice and power consuption is low,,,
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@adonay
erru norsk? :)
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kidkoala wrote:
@adonay
erru norsk? :)
hmm ja
back too topic @ j- golden http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=34&products_id=102 are these drives not the same
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@adonay
those drives where kinda nifty, especially this one:
http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=34&products_id=122
i like that it's embedded in a nice shell, and it would look very good mounted on eg. a A600..though a couple of downsides is that it's pretty pricey (ends up at around £80 if imported to Norway with import-taxes etc., can't find any of these on Ebay), and that you loose the ability to connect anything else to the 2.5" slot (if not using 4way ide-adapter or something).
by the way, what are the inches of your micro-drive? is it 1"?
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i'd never seem them before... they are really cool.
mmm.. ebay has some interesting bits...
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Compact-Flash-CF-to-IDE-adapter-boot-windows-linux_W0QQitemZ140055270945QQihZ004QQcategoryZ41994QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
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@monami
yes, those are quite popular among classic amiga-users, they fit nicely in all amiga's with a 2.5" slot like the 600 and 1200. Actually I just ordered two of those you mentioned, to use in my cd32 and my 600 :) ordered two 4gb cf-cards at the same time, really cheap.
there is a lot of scamming going on among these products i've read (cards that can't be written to more than a few times etc.) so watch out, hope i'm not getting scammed ;)
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I'm sure I read somewhere that you could boot from RAD: thus you would need to keep your Amiga powered up all the time but if it crashed then Workbench would load from your FastMem!
Could anyone who's used a RAD: disk shed some light on this?
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On a kinda related note, have you seen the MyIDE (http://www.atarimax.com/myide/documentation/index.html) flash drives for the Atari 800's? I have one with a 128MB Flash drive on it. Pretty cool!
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@TjLaZer
Awesome! Thanks for the link. That will be a future project for me. A500 is complete, A1200 is in progress, then comes Atari 800XL. Those are the 3 best "computer-in-a-keyboard" models ever made (C64 would be 4th on the list). I'll have them all upgraded to the maximum - while still keeping original graphics, sound and case.
Does that Atari 800 flash have any problems or does everything work perfectly?
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I've tried it. Works fine :)
Test: CF Adapter + CF card in A1200 (http://amigaweb.net/index.php?function=view_news&id=103)
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The expansion capabilities of the A1200 would have been far greater if it had been given the A500 case's 'rump'...
(http://a500.org/images/a1200.gif)
(http://a500.org/images/a500.gif)
:lol: