A1200 PATA EIDE hard drive?

[Daedalus]

Wow, between my 4 A1200s I've never had a problem with any of them supplying enough power for a 2.5" hard drive and modest accelerator. Laptop hard drives nowadays use *tiny* amounts of power. My first guess would be the cable - it's very easy to misconnect the cable to the A1200 board as the pins are "bare". Miss the last row and your drive has no power. Get it backwards or miss it off the other end and you can fry your drive, cable and/or motherboard.

Edit: I'll add to that that 2 of the A1200s also supply a CD-ROM drive, and all work on the standard A1200 PSU, and HDs varying from 30GB to 120GB...

[Daedalus]

Doubt it, as they don't even spin up at all, tried various makes but all with the same result, any drives over 6.5GB just simply wont even attempt to spin up whether they're ATA-33, ATA-66 or ATA-100..

That's very, very odd... I've no idea what makes are in my A1200s but I've had several, and have several, and never had a single problem (not counting dead drives of course). I know it's only my experience, but I certainly rule out capacity as the governing factor, and the fact that any machines I have will have an 020 or 030 accelerator and use the small A1200 PSU, I think power isn't really an issue either. Perhaps there is some damage to some traces or something on those boards Franko - are you sure it's supplying +5V on the IDE header?

[Daedalus]

@actung_bab

Well, I've never blown up a drive, but if the cable's connected wrongly you can potentially connect the +5V supply to ground via the drive's electronics, and that's bad.

cool you have squrriel scsi loved those really cool addon wish keep mine

Nope. 2 of my machines have IDE CD drives - one is a laptop drive taking power from the floppy connector and built into the wedge case, the other is a normal 5.25" CD-ROM drive from a PC, built into a custom case with the A1200 motherboard and a couple of extras. This is again powered from the floppy connector, and amazingly it all works, though it is at the limit power-wise.

[Daedalus]

Daedalus: Considering my extra strong PSU, maybe it's not the power.  I'm quite sure I hooked the HD up correctly.  It had 4 pins extra (in 2 rows) on the front side (front direction of the Amiga) of the HD connector.  What make and model HDs do you use on your A1200s?

I'll check out the drives I'm using when I have a chance at home. The 4 extra pins are normally for jumpers etc., so can be ignored once the main 44 pins are connected correctly.

[Daedalus]

@Mizar
Oops Some drives have a size clipping jumper which make the drive appear smaller for compatibility with older BIOSes. One of mine for example is 120GB, but shows up as 32GB if you use a jumper. One could also be for master/slave use though this is less common in laptop hard drives, and they usually assume to be master.

@Franko
Hmmm... Like I said, very odd! I just can't see how you could have 7 different motherboards which all have issues supplying enough power unless there's something wrong with all of them...

Now that you mention it though, I have the reset line cut on all mine due to issues with the drive not showing up under some circumstances. It's so long since I had an issue that I'm not sure if they were spinning up or not, but cutting pin 1 on the 44-way cable has no negative effect on the drive and resolves issues with reset timing - especially in master/slave configurations.

[Daedalus]

Ok... I made a cable that supplied the +5V from both the internal floppy drive or from a external PC PSU. Results... still no spin up on any of the large capacity drives (30GB & 60GB) all other drives (6.5GB and under) worked fine with this cable so it's not anything to do with the motherboards IDE header not supplying enough current...

Here's a list of the 2.5" drives tested....

Toshiba HDD2181 MK3021GAS DMA/ATA-100 30GB
Result = No Spin Up

Wow, as it happens, two of my drives are Toshiba HDD2181s, and both spin up fine. Both are also running off standard A1200 PSUs, both also power a CD-ROM drive ad one has a Blizzard 1230IV installed. No power issues... The 3rd is a Western Digital Scorpio 120GB, WD1200B EVE, and as I said before, takes even less current than the smaller Toshibas. I also have a 60GB Travelstar in one but don't have that machine here to tell you the exact model. That one works just fine as well. And, I've managed to run a 40GB IBM Deskstar 3.5" off the standard PSU in one 1200, some manner of Fujitsu 10GB drive and others in the past. The only reason a drive hasn't spun up on me is because it was dead...

Franko, have you tried these drives in any other computers besides Amigas? I.e., are you sure they're not dead?

[Daedalus]

Actually, it is 298GB.  They do the usual marketing ploy of calling it 320GB, but they are actually using the definition of 1GB=1 billion bytes.  They say this in the fine print on the box.  So, they call 320GB 320,000,000,000 bytes, which is the actual size.  But it's not 320GB, because 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 megabyte is 1024 KB, 1 gigabyte is 1024 MB, and 1 terabyte is 1024 GB.  So 320,000,000,000 / 1024^3 (cubed) is 298.02 GB.  However, ironically they use the true definition for a MB for the cache (1,048,576 bytes), which is 8MB, so that is the real value.  But if they use the 1 billion byte definition, they get to use a larger number for the capacity.  Kind of like how things always seem to cost $99.99, or $49.99, or $9.99, instead of $100, $50, or $10, because it looks like a lower amount, though there's no significant difference (nobody cares about one cent).  That's capitalism for you, heh.

Well, since this has only in the past few years made an appreciable difference, the SI unit people have clarified the whole GB=1,000,000,000 bytes thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

And so officially, a Gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes, just like a Gigahertz is 1,000,000,000 hertz. A Gibibyte is the binary version (2^30), or 1,073,741,824 bytes. So that hard drive is actually 320 Gigabytes, or 298 Gibibytes.

As an aside, I don't like this system, I have the binary system too well ingrained in my mind from >20 years working with it... But it's something I need to be aware of, as with increasing sizes of storage it's only gonna become a bigger issue.

Back on topic: I also tried a WD Scorpio 60GB in 2 A1200s - no issues with the standard PSU, CD-ROM and Blizzard 1230...

[Daedalus]

As clawws brought up make sure the the drive is assigned as "MASTER"  "CS" or cable select doesnt work with amigas!

If it's a 2.5" HD, it should default to master and you shouldn't need to add any jumpers at all - in fact, some drives don't even support CS or slave connection...