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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: fragment on May 25, 2003, 07:06:17 PM
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Hello Amiga people :-)
I bought my first Amiga (A500) about six months ago. It is used only for games/demos. And now I decided to buy an A1200 because it has AGA, IDE and PCMCIA etc... I should be getting it sometime next week.
I got this 2.5" IDE really cheap and afaik A1200 is limited to 4gb and this new drive is 4,3gb (8905 cyl, 15 heads, 63 sect/track). Does it work without problems or is the only solution to get AmigaOS 3.5/3.9? The machine has 3.1 roms and AmigaOS 3.1. I also have a 4mb ram expansion (can be fitted with a 8mb simm tho, shouldn't be a problem to find one)
Second.. What turboboard do you recommend? I'm planning buying a 060, so maybe a Viper 1260? I don't need any SCSIstuff and I want to keep the original case..
The machine is intended only as a toy (games/demos/some programming/light networking)
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I think the actual limit is 4.3GB, people just say 4GB 'cause it's easier to type.. or something :-D
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Workbench 3.1 comes with support for max 4gb drives. However there is a fix/update available for free at aminet, but I forgot its name. There is also a different filesystem, SFS, that performs very well, supports large drives and is free. I am not sure the newest version is on aminet, but it is out there on the net, at least. SFS is short for Smart FileSystem, afaik.
Sincerely,
-Kenneth Straarup.
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that_punk_guy wrote:
I think the actual limit is 4.3GB, people just say 4GB 'cause it's easier to type.. or something :-D
nope! its 4G! not 4.3, people say 4.3 becuase they are stupid and dont know about binary and decimal and hexadicimal and how to program and about computers - those people wouldnt know how to switch one on ;-)
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Does it work without problems or is the only solution to get AmigaOS 3.5/3.9?
It will work fine, though you can only use 4gb and not the extra .3 without extra software :-)
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Fragment's frustration:
I got this 2.5" IDE really cheap and afaik A1200 is limited to 4gb and this new drive is 4,3gb (8905 cyl, 15 heads, 63 sect/track). Does it work without problems or is the only solution to get AmigaOS 3.5/3.9?
;-) It’s down to the difference between binary notation and decimal notation. The actual limit is 4 binary gigabytes, or 4* 2^32. In decimal notation this number is 4,292,967,296, which rounds up to 4.3 decimal gigabytes. The marketing department usually puts the decimal interpretation on the package because it looks bigger to the layman.
:-( OS 3.1’s FFS on your A1200 will be able to use the first 4,292,967,296 bytes of your hard drive. Any attempt to write above that limit will result in data being written at the address that is 4,292,967,296 bytes lower than what you wanted. This results in a “wrap around” effect, which causes you to overwrite data that’s already there, destroying it. This includes the data in the disk’s Rigid Disk Block, which tells the drive where one partition begins and another ends, and so on.
:-) However, it seems that your drive matches your A1200’s abilities perfectly, so you should have no worries, even without OS 3.5 or OS 3.9.
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Just partition the hard drive and you'll be fine. It's the partitions
that can't be beyond 4G, not drives. (I used to run a pair of 9-gig
drives split into 3rds)
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If you don't want to upgrade the OS or part of it (filesystem, scsi.device), then you can use only the first 4GB of the drive and maximum size for one partition is 2GB. The drive itself can be any size, but just don't make partitions on area above the 4GB... just leave the rest of the space unused.
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Now you've really confused him!
I'll do my bit by saying that the capacity of a drive is LESS than its quoted size. My first Hard Drive that came with this A2000HD was a 52Mb Quantum that only registered as 49Mb to the system.
My second (which I recently returned to use) was a 850Mb Quantum that (after partitioning) showed as 810Mb.
My normal boot partition is on a Seagate 1.08Gb drive that shows an even 1Gb.
So those, in turn, are using 95% / 94% and 92% of designated size.
4Gb divided by 4.3Gb returns 93%.
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That limit is per partition, right? I mean if divide the drive into seperate FFS partitions, you should be fine... Yes? All my A4K drives are less than 4G, so I've never tried it. *shrug*
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My opinion is to wait a few months more and purchase the new AmigaOne. To buy an A1200 these days is not a waste of money, but it is an old machine. AmigaOne will be the BEST!!! Just wait...
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AmigaONE might be the best, but it's also expensive! I'll get one later, but for now the A1200 that I picked up last month is good for getting to know AmigaOS again, after many years of other OSes.
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A 4.3Gb drive is actually a 4.0Gb drive, because hard drive manufacturers quote a gigabyte as 4,000,000,000 bytes, whereas the commonly accepted gigabyte is actually 4,294,267,296 bytes.
This means hard drive manufacturers can make their drives look bigger on marketing spiel than they really are.
Since a 4Gb drive is 4,294,267,296 bytes, hard drive manufacturers call it 4.3 (decimal) Gb.
So, he can use all of his hard disk without any NSD patch.
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Phantom206 wrote:
My opinion is to wait a few months more and purchase the new AmigaOne. To buy an A1200 these days is not a waste of money, but it is an old machine. AmigaOne will be the BEST!!! Just wait...
Naah.. I have a PC to do all "modern stuff". I just wanted an oold Amiga to play with. :-P
BTW the hard disk works perfectly, thanks everybody :-)
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In my opinion, you might be disappointed with a 1260.
Sure the proc is much faster than your current setup, however, depending upon what you are doing you will still bottleneck on the AGA graphics chipset, which is slow, slow.
The only amiga's that ever got around this limitation were big box amiga's. you can tower your A1200 and get a mediator and voodoo3, which will help some, although, I don't know exactly how fast that will be not having had one, but its got to be better...
I owned an a1200/060, and I was not happy with the upgrade. I would have taken a 1240, with a graphics card any day of the week over a 1260...both is preferrable...but given a choice, and that this is a hobby, i would be happiest with the graphics card.
of course, back when I was deciding, the only choice was zorro 2 expansions, and a rumoured system called ateo bus...which eventually became reality and then folded not much long after that.
but today, the mediator is quite a solid solution. still it connects to the a1200 bus, and will be limited by that interface.
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Although I was very impressed with the 1260 - 66 (going from
basically a stock 1200 + fastram), what MarkTime is saying
about AGA is true. You can patch it up to make it a bit more
tolerable, but browsing in (slow) 8 bit...combined with 50Hz
ficker (using PAL) makes it a bummer at times. Another
annoying thing is the slowness of the 1200's IDE. If I did it
over, I would have started with an A4000. The good '060 cards
for those have built in ultra - wide scsi...not to mention the
relative ease of adding a decent (for amigas) gfx card.
The 1200 is still a great hobby machine though. I use mine all
of the time and overall have had a blast with it. The few
little quirks aren't really that bad considering the era of
the machine, not to mention that you can add better/faster
drive support and video if you're willing to pay for it.
If you're into demos, the 1260 is probably the best
choice...there're quite a few nice AGA ones out there that
really take advantage of an '060. It's extremely impressive
what some of these coders have accomplished with 50mhz
and old AGA. So to make a long story short...if you're
getting an '060 and don't need SCSI, the Viper looks like
a great card...:)