Did somebody try a flash disk inside an A1200 ?

[Hyperspeed]

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.

[Hyperspeed]

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.

[Hyperspeed]

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.



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 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.

[Hyperspeed]

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.

[Hyperspeed]

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

[Hyperspeed]

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?

[Hyperspeed]

The expansion capabilities of the A1200 would have been far greater if it had been given the A500 case's 'rump'...




:lol: