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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Mrs Beanbag on January 23, 2012, 11:30:24 AM
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I'm thinking of investing in a solid state drive for my Amiga. Its 1.2Gb drive is getting on a bit now, it's all backed up on my PC but I have nightmares about it failing.
Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware?
Also what would be the best/easiest way to reinstall all my things on a new drive? I gather there are programs for Linux that will write Amiga partition tables and file systems. My Amiga does have a network card.
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Easiest way to initialize a hardware drive is:
- Either your Amiga or...
- Mounting the new HD on your PC via WinUAE and initializing from there.
If you have a backup copy there, you can restore it easily from there as well, and then transfer the HD on your real Amiga.
If you don't have a backup, it's just fine but it also needs 2 more steps:
1. Mount your current HD to WinUAE, and take a backup of your partitions by using:
1> dh0:
1> lha a -aezrx windh_c:dh0_backup.lha #?
That will create an lha archive named dh0_backup.lha of the partition DH0: inside your PC's C: drive (be sure to enable "Add PC drives at Startup" in Hard Drives tab)
You can repeat the same procedure for all your other partitions :)
2. Mount your new HD to WinUAE, initialize it and format it (if it's not already) and then:
1> dh0:
1> lha x windh_c:dh0_backup.lha
That will restore everything the backup has (from your PC's C: drive) into your newly setup DH0: partition (be sure to enable "Add PC drives at Startup" in Hard Drives tab again).
Repeat for all the other partitions and you're set :)
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A real SSD would be a big waste of money IMHO. A CF-IDE adapter and a CF card with 20x speed (ca. 3 MB/s) is sufficient. Every faster device would be slowed down by the Amiga's IDE port.
To copy the data, you should connect both drives to the same computer. I would recommend WinUAE for the job, but you didn't mention Windows.
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A real SSD would be a big waste of money IMHO. A CF-IDE adapter and a CF card with 20x speed (ca. 3 MB/s) is sufficient. Every faster device would be slowed down by the Amiga's IDE port.
To copy the data, you should connect both drives to the same computer. I would recommend WinUAE for the job, but you didn't mention Windows.
I was looking at this one:
http://www.xstra.eu/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=844&category_id=265&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=3&lang=en
that's a fairly small waste of money if you ask me but a CF card could have its advantages.
I don't run Windows, I run Linux and I don't have UAE installed at the moment (I do all my Amiga stuff on real Amigas). It might be simplest just to make a boot disk with HD tools and AmiTCP on it.
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that's a fairly small waste of money
Well, http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00300110A plus http://www.amazon.de/dp/B000VY7HYM will give you four times the space for half the money.
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CF really is the way to go.
I've had the best luck with SanDisk CF cards in the 4GB range, and they just give the adapters away on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Small-CF-Compact-Flash-Card-2-5-IDE-44-Pins-Male-Adapter-Converter-/190598540670?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c608eed7e
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A true SSD, 2.5" IDE or SATA (via adapter) form factor would likely be a complete waste of money for an A1200. You're still going to be fighting the slow native IDE interface of the machine.
Benefits of a CF solution are the fact you can simply pop new CF cards into the machine to boot different configs, and along with that use said CF cards with an inexpensive add-on USB card reader on a commodity machine using UAE to set them up. The internal 2.5" drive you'd have to remove each time, where as a CF card you can just pop out if the mod is done right. CF solution is a hell of a lot cheaper, to boot.
I have SSD's in all my machines, using RevoDrive's in my PC's lately. Got a 32 GB Patriot SATA SSD in my SAM 440 machine that works extremely well, but then again it's native SATA onboard. Machine boots from cold to ready to use in a matter of seconds, was really a stunning difference when I put a SSD in it.
Depending on your views on SSD tech and the accompanying OS's, many people dislike using SSD's on any machine that does not support TRIM - which AFAIK, the Amiga does not.
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Forget about SSDs, they don't last very long: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
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TRIM hopes to combat the issues of SSD's regarding longevity. Early SSD's were junk as far as I am concerned, but have come a long ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
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Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate :)
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Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate :)
Well even 4GB is not so much nowadays. My 1200 has a 16GB drive, but even that one is pretty full now.
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Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate :)
There's no way I'm ever going to get close to using 1 Gb let alone 4, so "four times the capacity" isn't really a selling point. Quiet and fast, that I like the sound of. I'm mainly just conscious that my existing HD isn't going to last forever. An industrial grade SSD has its appeal, to me, over a compact flash card which isn't really intended to be used this way. The money isn't that much of a problem (heck I can drink that much money in an evening). The thing I care about most is reliability.
TRIM only needs to come in after you write to the drive a lot. I don't imagine that is ever going to be a factor, either, and even when it does come in it's only to restore it back to original speed. I don't know about this but I suspect the reliability issues with PCs are caused by the high throughput the devices have to endure from modern operating systems.
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Never had a problem with CF in ide or the PCMCIA. Used both for years now with the same two cards. Sandisk appear to be the best, and the faster CF's do seem to give more throughput, for some reason. Good thread here on eab:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=47708
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There's no way I'm ever going to get close to using 1 Gb let alone 4, so "four times the capacity" isn't really a selling point.
Well getting a 1GB CF card is getting harder and harder, especially a sandisk. So maybe 2 or 4GB will do fine too.
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Whenever I back up an Amiga so I can put a new drive in it, I make an uncompressed LHA file of the entire drive contents and copy it to a SD card with a PCMCIA card reader. Then I prepare and format the new drive in the Amiga using a floppy disk I have prepared with PFS3, HDInstTools, Fat95, CompactFlash.device, LHA and some other bits. After the partitions are formatted, I simply extract the LHA back onto the fresh partition.
I'm not sure why people make things more complicated by swapping drives around and using Windows and UAE, perhaps it's because they don't have a floppy disk handy.
I have been using CF cards in my CD32, A1200 and A600 for years and I swear by them. I have also seen people with solid state drives in their Amiga and they're happy with them too. I suppose you buy what you can afford. I recently finally swapped my 2GB CF for a 8GB one because I was constantly shuffling things around on my drive as it was 99-100% full all the time. I never thought I'd need so much space but eventually I did fill it up. There are a lot of games, software, and media to put on there. I like having 8GB now because I can store several of my favourite musical pieces in high quality 8SVX format, so I can listen to a long playlist of music and it's not CPU-intensive like MP3s.
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You can install a cf easy with a real amiga, dont need to use emuls, if you have any problem with hdtoolbox theres some hdtoolbox for cf for prepare it like any other hd, i have it somewhere on a disk, if you need it tell me.
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You can install a cf easy with a real amiga, dont need to use emuls, if you have any problem with hdtoolbox theres some hdtoolbox for cf for prepare it like any other hd, i have it in somewhere on a disk, if you need it tell me.
I just noticed AmigaKit are selling them pre-formatted with an install disk, which sounds convenient. I might consider that, as well as a PCMCIA card reader.
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A bit overpriced but is the easiest way, enjoy it =)
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Setting up a CF from WinUAE is really good if you haven't got any floppies handy. I bought an ExpressCard CF adapter for my laptop, which is just the most wonderful thing to use.
I've also got a PCMCIA CF adapter for the miggy and use a FastATA on one of the A1200's.
SanDisk brand CF's (one 4GB, one 2GB). Utterly brilliant.
Protip: You can grab a byte-for-byte copy of the CF (in Windows, using a port of the *NIX tool 'dd') and use it as a hardfile in WinUAE without any fuss.
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well, ofc, CF is much cheaper as you can get small size. but keep in mind (if you use Amiga a lot) that SSD was designed to be used as hard drive.
CF, on the other hand, are mostly used as digital camera storage. so, they probably have lower number of writes.
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this is true. Does anyone know what life expectancy is for these cards anyways, when used with an amiga?
I've heard very few stories of cards failing, presumably it's helped that the amiga OS doesn't write to the card constantly.
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I'm thinking of investing in a solid state drive for my Amiga. Its 1.2Gb drive is getting on a bit now, it's all backed up on my PC but I have nightmares about it failing.
Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware?
Also what would be the best/easiest way to reinstall all my things on a new drive? I gather there are programs for Linux that will write Amiga partition tables and file systems. My Amiga does have a network card.
I have a Fast ATA IV and CF works but my computer would never boot from cold. You always had to do a warm boot to get it going. I had the same issue with the CF card andthe EIDEx4 adapter I had before that. It was not the end of the world, but it annoyed me none the less.
I ended up switching to a transcend 4GB disk-on-modele(which did not have the cold boot problem) and I added a dual IDE SATA converter and ran the SATA ports to external eSATA ports.
On one of the external eSATA ports I usually keep 60GB SSD and occasionally plug in a external DVD drive.
In the future I may mount the SSD internal.
I'm not using the full 60GB but figure I have already carved out:
4GB of amiga related MPEG1 videos (i play with RiVA)
4GB partition for whdload games.
4GB partition for backing up stuff
4GB MP3 and MOD files
4GB of classic mac crap.
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A lot of people on Amiga forums like to jump in on these threads and mention how CF cards have a limited amount of writes and how they might eventually stop working or something.
Don't worry about this. Don't worry about these people or their misinformation.
CF cards do have a limited amount of writes, and if you use one as your main hard drive for ten years you might notice that the overall capacity has slightly decreased over the years. That's because when the memory cells in the CF card have reached their write limit, they are disabled so they aren't able to be written to anymore. CF/SD/SDHC cards are all designed to do this automatically. They don't just suddenly stop working, or start giving write errors. You will never encounter a problem other than a slightly dwindling capacity in later years. Meaning your once 1.9GB drive might end up showing as 1.88GB if you decide to format it after using it for a decade. It happens so slowly and transparently that you'll never notice.
Also, since AmigaOS isn't bloatware like Windows and most Linux distributions, it doesn't need to constantly write to the drive when it's not even doing anything.
If you would like, I can prepare a brand new 8GB CF card for you using PFS3 or SFS (it's up to you, but I don't recommend FFS) with a couple of partitions, install Workbench 3.1 as well as an additional Workbench pack if you'd like (ClassicWB or AmigaSYS), test it with a brand new IDE-CF adapter to make sure it all works together, and send them to you for free. It's the least I could do for you for giving us all Mr. Beanbag!