a600 has some advantages, builtin IDE, small case.
it also has that 4/8Mb fast ram expansion, perfect for whdload
Although the computer had the internal design works for the hard-drive only the latter machines were able to support the hard-drive. Eventually an A600HD was released which had fitted either 20, 40 or 80 Mb hard-drives
I know this to be true having tried for several weeks to get an A600 working with a hard drive. Became quite a project on The Crypt and Amiga_sa groups. We were pretty much doing everything possible to make it work but with no luck.
Very early versions of Kickstart 2.05, such as V37.299 are actually missing scsi.device from ROM, so despite having an IDE controller on the motherboard you cannot actually use it unless you upgrade the Kickstart chip. At least Kickstart 2.05 (V37.350) is recommended if you wish to use hard drives in an A600.
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=10Although most A600's used 2.05, very early A600's used 2.04, and thus had no internal IDE or PCMCIA support. Richard Lane notes that these unlucky A600 owners had to upgrade to 2.05 (specifically Kickstart v37.300, which added both IDE & PCMCIA support) if they wanted to use either IDE hard drives or PCMCIA cards.
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_205.htmlI do know of Amiga users claiming that all versions of the 600 can support a hard drive. However, from my own experiences I can say I at least had a problem. Fortunately I did get another A600 and that worked with the hard drive no problem. So not the hard drive being faulty.
PS The 600 isn't a brilliant computer and not even that much of a space saver. The 1200 is way better a machine and far more expandible, without the struggle.
