Folks,
Long time no see and a merry Christmas too!
Question: I've just emptied a bunch of old 4GB IDE hard drives. What with the prevalence of both a. SATA drives, and b. Huge disks compared to what older systems were intended to run with; should I be considering saving them?
Or is there a convenient away around this these days that someone has come up with?
(Before said drives are stripped for the magnets and Molex sockets...)
Cheers!
For IDE on amiga 600,1200,4000 etc the easiest way is to use a IDE to Compactflash adapter and use a cf card as a hard drive. you could also use ide to sata adapters that are cheap. Most Amigas cope fine with big drives to the terrabyte sizes with proper filesystems like sfs and pfs3. partitions must be under 128Gb each in many cases.
Amiga os3.9 deals with big hd's well,but os3.1 and earlier needs patching.
for most scsi 1 or 2 stuff there are:
1> scsi card readers such as pcd-47,50,60b-not so easy or cheap to find now.
2> acard 7720U,scsi to ide bridge, can be used with ide hd or ide to cf adapter and cf cards etc. this is the fastest solution yielding 9MB/s or so on fast scsi cards/scsi on accelerators. not cheap but a great solution.
3>acard 7720UW ultrawide scsi to ide bridge,great for cyberstorm ppc and MKIII ultrawide scsi.
4> acard 7730a Uwscsi to sata bridge, good for adding sata to csppc and MKIII etc.
5> scsi2SD, 50 pin scsi adapter to use a SD card on it. not great speed,especially on write,but beats nothing any day. fairly cost effective, amigakit has these now.
There are a few scsi to ide bridges made by yamaha and IoData but they are less common and probably as much as acards.
Addonics bridges are just relabeled Acard stuff,all update firmwares from acard work on them.
In short, its always handy to keep the drives around,never know when you need soemthing to test with real quick. Worst case sell them here or on ebay cheap, i am sure someone will want them. I always keep old real hd's around for those cases when you are trying to eliminate variables.
