SCSI Alternative HDD for Amiga 500

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Never heard of the Protar before.  Looked it up on amiga.resource.cx, looks like a nice chassis, then I got to the part about "supports only special Protar SIMMs".  Booo.  

It does say it supports SCSI direct though, so that's a good thing.  They have protarscsi.device driver and a ROM image on there too, I wonder how much you can find out about what version ROM you have, and updating it to the latest?

Nice design, might not be worth the hassle though due to the custom SIMM requirement.  Easier to swap with a GVP sidecar (which also has the stylish design) and is much easier to find updates and RAM for, IMHO.  Guess it just depends on how much you like banging your head against the wall.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

A lot of older games are not going to be hard disk installable unless you use WHDLoad, in which case you might as well upgrade to 3.1, since WHDLoad doesn't care what ROM version is actually installed, it will load older ROM versions from disk as needed for compatibility.

Does WHDLoad even work under 1.3?  Also you'll be crippling yourself to use 1.3 since the newer versions of Workbench include a much more capable HDToolbox for mounting & prepping/partitioning hard drives.  But, go ahead and use 1.3 if you like making your life difficult!