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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: barney on June 29, 2009, 03:55:20 AM
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What is better, to use a IDE floppy drive on an Amiga 1200 or a compact flash card? Which is faster? Which one is more reliable? Is it worrth removing my hard drive and installing one of these instead?
Thanks.
Barney
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What is better, to use a IDE floppy drive on an Amiga 1200 or a compact flash card? Which is faster? Which one is more reliable? Is it worrth removing my hard drive and installing one of these instead?
Thanks.
Barney
Not sure what you mean by better....apples and oranges.
Throw your HD in the bin and fit a 4/8GB Sandisk CF card, no contest. Then buy a PCMCIA CF card reader and never use your floppy drive again :)
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I do have a cf-adapter and 1GB cf card working in A1200. Its a bit faster then a real 2.5" harddrive because of no spinup and nearly no seek time. It also spare heat, space and power consume.
On the other hand any flash memory is wearing-out by every write access. Using flash memory as a mass storage device, its durability will shrink against usage as generally storage in mp3/digicam/etc. devices.
Also the desired cf card MUST support the IDE standard! Most Sandisk and Kingston do. If this mode is not supported by the cf-firmware it will not work as an IDE drive insinde the Amiga.
Beside this some cf-card dont work correctly with the Amiga reset signal line. If so, the card will not be seen after exiting the kickstart boot-menu (early startup). A possible fix will be to cut line #1 on the cf-adapter pdb to cf-card.
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err it says ** IDE floppy drive **
iv not seen this type of drive on a A1200 IDE port..... iv seen SCSI floppy drive but not on amiga SCSI chain.
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You forgot the LS120, mate.
1.44Mb drive and 120Mb floppies at the same time. Via IDE.
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i missed that one ls-120 how can i forget.
but i do have here which i think is a LS-120 but i think it's SCSI not sure will have to take a look at it when i have time it was taken from a MAC tower.
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err it says ** IDE floppy drive **
iv not seen this type of drive on a A1200 IDE port..... iv seen SCSI floppy drive but not on amiga SCSI chain.
Yeah he did say IDE Floppy but then went on to mention replacing a HD with a flash card, so I assume the question was in that context. If you only use your A1200 to play HD games and don't do a lot of writes then a newer flash card will last for years. I was suggested a SANDISK Ultra II, 4 or 8GB as very compatible. One is on its way here as I type.
BTW: I've had a cheapy compact flash card in my Digi camera since 2004. I estimate I've taken around 20,000 photos on it and it's still going strong.
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Yeah he did say IDE Floppy but then went on to mention replacing a HD with a flash card, so I assume the question was in that context. If you only use your A1200 to play HD games and don't do a lot of writes then a newer flash card will last for years. I was suggested a SANDISK Ultra II, 4 or 8GB as very compatible. One is on its way here as I type.
BTW: I've had a cheapy compact flash card in my Digi camera since 2004. I estimate I've taken around 20,000 photos on it and it's still going strong.
Re : CF lifespan, I don't know how legit' the tests were but I found this comment on the mr zonbu site. If you can use them for this long on a linux based machine with swap a little ole A1200 should last twice as long.: (Quote)
"This would have been the case a few year ago. Modern CF cards controllers implement block rotation in hardware, which means that the swap is not always written on the same blocks.
We evaluated that it would take 10 years continuously writing on the card before the failure risk becomes significant.
_________________
Aymeric
Zonbu Engineering Team"
Ten years continuously ? Hard to believe.
Gertsy
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Why not. It's not like the entire card is rewritten every time you change a cell.
On an Amiga, the only regular write you can't get rid of is the .backdrop file on every boot. Hardly close to the beating a swap file gets.
The CF card may well outlive the Amiga it's connected to.
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it's possible with-in 10 years read/write will inprove as well as how long CF cards can hold onto data.
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All modern flash memory card do support internal wear-leaving. Even if only the first block (RDB) is rewritten over and over again, the flash memory will not be rewitten at the same cells. The internal logic will transparent-rotate and only write to "the oldest" flash cell.
So the bigger the flash memory is, the expected live-time will grow by the same amount of write access.
I can test an LS-120 IDE floppy drive to work in the Amiga1200. Could take some time until then.