SSD for A1200

[Cammy]

Whenever I back up an Amiga so I can put a new drive in it, I make an uncompressed LHA file of the entire drive contents and copy it to a SD card with a PCMCIA card reader. Then I prepare and format the new drive in the Amiga using a floppy disk I have prepared with PFS3, HDInstTools, Fat95, CompactFlash.device, LHA and some other bits. After the partitions are formatted, I simply extract the LHA back onto the fresh partition.

I'm not sure why people make things more complicated by swapping drives around and using Windows and UAE, perhaps it's because they don't have a floppy disk handy.

I have been using CF cards in my CD32, A1200 and A600 for years and I swear by them. I have also seen people with solid state drives in their Amiga and they're happy with them too. I suppose you buy what you can afford. I recently finally swapped my 2GB CF for a 8GB one because I was constantly shuffling things around on my drive as it was 99-100% full all the time. I never thought I'd need so much space but eventually I did fill it up. There are a lot of games, software, and media to put on there. I like having 8GB now because I can store several of my favourite musical pieces in high quality 8SVX format, so I can listen to a long playlist of music and it's not CPU-intensive like MP3s.

[Cammy]

A lot of people on Amiga forums like to jump in on these threads and mention how CF cards have a limited amount of writes and how they might eventually stop working or something.

Don't worry about this. Don't worry about these people or their misinformation.

CF cards do have a limited amount of writes, and if you use one as your main hard drive for ten years you might notice that the overall capacity has slightly decreased over the years. That's because when the memory cells in the CF card have reached their write limit, they are disabled so they aren't able to be written to anymore. CF/SD/SDHC cards are all designed to do this automatically. They don't just suddenly stop working, or start giving write errors. You will never encounter a problem other than a slightly dwindling capacity in later years. Meaning your once 1.9GB drive might end up showing as 1.88GB if you decide to format it after using it for a decade. It happens so slowly and transparently that you'll never notice.

Also, since AmigaOS isn't bloatware like Windows and most Linux distributions, it doesn't need to constantly write to the drive when it's not even doing anything.

If you would like, I can prepare a brand new 8GB CF card for you using PFS3 or SFS (it's up to you, but I don't recommend FFS) with a couple of partitions, install Workbench 3.1 as well as an additional Workbench pack if you'd like (ClassicWB or AmigaSYS), test it with a brand new IDE-CF adapter to make sure it all works together, and send them to you for free. It's the least I could do for you for giving us all Mr. Beanbag!