born again amigan!

[Cammy]

Hi gunni, welcome back.

I think a smart investment for your A500 since you have SCSI is a SCSI card reader. These things can read CF, SD and other flash media cards, and are the size of a 3.5" floppy drive. I'm not sure if it would be possible to mount it inside the GVP case, but it should be fine without a case. You can mount up to five cards at once, and they can all be booted from as regular hard drives. The advantage is they are silent and load data faster than an old hard drive, and you can easily get them from local shops. You can buy them here if you're interested: http://a4000t.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=68&products_id=184&zenid=55e0eddb694bed9b4883cd70b3c5adaa

If you don't want to accidently break something by opening it up and poking around, you can clean a floppy drive's heads with a special floppy drive cleaning kit, which comes with a cleaning disk and some fluid to drop into the cleaning pad of the disk. You might be lucky to find one at a local computer or stationary shop, or you can find them on eBay here:

UK: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaner-Wet-Dry-Cleaning-Kit-/190406236846
US: http://cgi.ebay.com/Gemini-3-5-3-1-2-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaning-Kit-NEW-/200614297787
AU: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Halloa-3-5-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Head-Cleaner-Kit-/260775532907
HK: http://cgi.ebay.com/3-5-Floppy-Disk-Drive-Cleaner-Wet-Dry-Cleaning-Kit-/160576872586

I hope you've got some extra RAM too because a Kickstart 3.1 upgrade (maybe with a ROM switcher to choose between 1.3 and 3.1) would really help out. You could install WHDLoad and hundreds or thousands of your old favourite Amiga games without needing to resort to using old, unreliable floppy disks. You can also install some pretty slick Workbench setups and game selector menus to boot into too. If you're interested in a ROM switcher or a S-Video adapter (perfect for a crisp display on a LCD screen) you might want to check out this site: http://amigamaniac.com

Good luck with everything, don't forget to search for Amiga stuff on YouTube to get more ideas of what you can do with them, there's plenty of stuff on there.

[Cammy]

It should work fine on the A3000, and any other Amiga with SCSI. But remember the cards are treated as internal hard drives, so they're mounted the same way and aren't hot-swappable like USB or PCMCIA card readers (I guess they're more like the IDE ones many of us use in our A1200s and A600s).