Drive Updating

[MiAmigo]

A few of questions about 'modern' SCSI drives, and the A2000:

1). This week, I'd like to get a new SCSI drive for my machine. I know that the Amiga has to have an initial boot drive partition of no more than 2 gigs, but, overall, what is the upper limit of the total drive size it can take?

2). Is there such a thing as a new SCSI drive (such as a Cheetah) being 'too fast' for the Amiga hardware?

3). Are there any drive utilities available for backing up, and transferring of data from one drive to another, like Partition Magic, or Drive Image, or something like that, or will I have to do a complete reinstall?

I figure replacing my old 4.3 gig drive is the first step towards greater system stability, and, hopefully, one of the easiest things to do, so I'd like to get it out of the way before I get too much time and effort invested in customizing my OS3.9 environment.

[MiAmigo]

kgrach wrote:
@MiAmigo
The simple answer is this Buy PFS3 or download  SFS for free both give you the ability to use Hard Drives of any size and huge partition sizes. PLUS they are faster than FFS and you can no longer invalidate a hard drive. You can literaly pull the plug while copying a file and not invalidate your hard drive. PS I have tried that monuever to test thier claims and it actually works!!!
Why any Amiga user currently still uses FFS is really beyond me.
I currently use SFS with my A1 and I can tell you I recently mounted a 250 Gig HD with only one 250 Gig partition and it worked just fine.
The only problem I have ever encountered using PFS or SFS is on a GVP SCSI card as It DOES NOT FOLLOW THE RDB SPECIFICATIONS AS LAID OUT BY COMMODORE BACK IN THE LATE EIGHTIES.
In that case your boot drive must be a FFS partition but your others can be anything you like. If your are using OS3.9 and the new ROMupdates then you can also use larger size drives only your boot partition must reside in the first 4.3 gigs
Hope that help
Kgrach

That's fantastic news. As you can see, I am using GVP, and I don't care about having to use a smaller boot partition. I would like to be able to take advantage of the size and relative stability of a newerr drive.

[MiAmigo]

Wow. Reading all that just showed me I have a lot of catching up to do on the ins and outs of SCSI technology, past & present. I don't even know  if I have I or II. No wonder I've been having so much trouble with terminator issues. Guess I spent too much time with IDE devices...

[MiAmigo]

Also, I'm really interested in the new file systems. Can either one of them convert my current file system, w/o loss of data? As long as either would play nice with my GVP controller, I'm game.

[MiAmigo]

Piru wrote:
@Kgrach
Uhm, are you *absolutely* sure AmigaoS 3.9 in any way helps giving >4GB access with GVP SCSI? I'm not.
To my knowlege the deciding factor is the firmware rom of the controller. If the firmware driver (gvpscsi.device) is too old, no filesystem can fix the 4GB limit.

I may be completely off-base here, but...
Here's something I'm considering doing to hopefully make it possible to play some old games like Turrican. Disable automount on the GVP by opening jumper  9 then boot from a floppy with a (different?) scsi.device, and new, modified mount files. Theoretically, shouldn't this work for a new filesys as well?