solid state drives

[systmcrsh]

howdy. i had a problem booting my a600 over the weekend from an internal 2.5" hard drive. im pretty experienced with hard drive failures. im pretty sure some sectors on the disk are going bad... leaving the machine on for ~10 minutes it eventually booted, probably after many read-retries.

anyways, im gonna replace the disk - options being either another 2.5" HD, or a compact flash/ide solution. however the price of SSDs are falling and i found a 2GB IDE SSD for $49 made by transcend. im sure its performance isn't on par with the more expensive SSDs, but i'd think it would be more than adequate for an amiga.

i've heard of some people having problems with transcends compact flash cards though, and was curious of anyone's experiences with them.

i'm assuming that if the 2GB SSD fully complies with the IDE standard it should work in an amiga. right?

[systmcrsh]

its this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3302787&CatId=3798

i ordered one on my work's corporate account so if it doesnt work i can return it i'll post up here how it goes!

[systmcrsh]

orange wrote:
perhaps it was FFS validating HDD for those 10 minutes?

yeah i think this might be the case... i took out the drive and hooked it up to my desktop pc (linux). smart status was ok on boot...

after booting i used dd to clone the drive to a standard 3.5" ide drive: dd if=/dev/amiga of=/dev/clone

dd finished without error. i ran UAE and used the cloned disk as my harddrive. booted up fine, but after a few minutes gave me an error like ... 'error validating Work, block ####'

something like that. right now im running disksalv on the clone in UAE to see what happens.

anyway, im glad that my files were still readable.

oh and btw, im not an expert in amiga & i've always been curious: is there a favorable way to poweroff/shutdown the system? i always just hit the power switch on the powersupply. this just seems really wrong to me.

[systmcrsh]

thought i'd update this thread... this drive works great!

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3302787&CatId=3798

a couple of notes though... had problems with the standard hd install. no problems at all with hdinsttools though.

the above drive is listed as MLC, but the drive itself is labelled by transcend as SLC - not that it makes much of a difference for amigas.

also, this drive - and i suspect other solid state drives - are EXTREMELY susceptible to static discharge damage. i have literally handled thousands of electronics, chips, etc. and have never damaged a component via static discharge. the first drive i recieved worked fine, but when i unplugged it from my pc to install it in the a600 it got damaged somehow and was completely dead --- not anything like a standard drive where sometimes if you mess with a dead drive long enough you can get it to boot 1 more time... this drive died and was dead for good. luckily tiger direct replaced it (dont tell them it was my fault

oh yeah the drive is silent. performance wise its only a bee's penis faster.