A1200 PATA EIDE hard drive?

[Mizar]

I'm trying to replace my HD in my A1200, and would appreciate some advice.  I tried installing an EIDE Western Digital 80GB one, but the system wouldn't recognize it in HDToolBox, and I didn't hear it power up with the system like it should.  I read an A1200 hardware FAQ that said most IDE drives will work with the A1200, including EIDE.  It described them as Fast ATA.  The drive I tried was a Parallel ATA one, though EIDE.  Is this a different kind of drive that won't ever work, or do I just need to try a different brand?

I've heard about the Compact Flash drives that can be used in lieu of an actual hard drive, and those sound advantageous.  I don't need a gigantic 80 to 320GB drive like the Western Digital ones, so maybe that would be a better option.  My A1200 has 68030/68882, 32 MB fast RAM, Surf Squirrel SCSI, and OS3.9 BB1.  What all hard drive types are going to be compatible with the A1200?

[Mizar]

Zac67: I thought with OS3.9 you don't have to worry about the 4GB+ problem.  If I recall, the master/slave concept applies to SCSI.  I'm trying to connect this HD to the internal IDE controller, so I probably don't need to mess with any jumpers, right?

Damiga: Yes, I'm quite sure I connected it correctly.  The drive's connector had a few extra pins (4- I think), but I connected it the same way as the old one.  That is, the IDE lead all the way to the top pin (same direction as the back of the Amiga).  Thanks for the EIDE link.  That helped clarify some things, such as the IDE/EIDE/ATA/PATA labels really don't tell you any specifics of the modes and standards that would affect if a drive is compatible with the A1200's IDE controller or not.  Of course, one certain way to more easily acquire a compatible drive would be to get one from an Amiga dealer who knows what they have works.  :-)

Franko: I'm using 2.5" HDs.  I recently heard 3.5" can be used with the A1200, but it sounds like that much more fiddling and stuff to worry about.  Yes, that's what happened with the 80GB one I tried recently- it didn't even spin up.  I would also very much like to know if anyone has a list of what  makes & models of larger capacity 2.5" HDs work on the A1200.

x56h34: Interesting, it sounds like the underpowered A1200 power supply could be the real issue.  My 1200 has an accelerator, however it has a more powerful power supply.  I thought I remembered the distributor included an A500 one.  I checked and compared it to my A500's power supply, and it is even more powerful than that.  I'm not sure, but it may be an A600 power supply.  The 500's is model DSP-A500, output 5V 4.5A, 12V 1A, -12V .1A.  The 1200's is model PSM-600, output 5V 6.5A, 12V 2A, -12V .5A.  Yet this was not enough to spin up the Western Digital HD.  Maybe Seagate and Hitachi are more power efficient?  Or maybe WD has a specific IDE/ATA standard incompatibility (though they're supposed to be downward compatible Zac67 was saying)?  What's the total voltage requirement to spin up the Seagate and Hitachi drives?

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?

Khephren: I wonder if there is a difference with A1200 motherboard power.  My 1200 is dated Dec. 4, 1995.

[Mizar]

I think he was talking to me :-).  I have a CDRW drive in an external case hooked up with the Surf Squirrel SCSI.

Under what circumstances would the extra 4 pins on the HD IDE connector need a jumper?

@actung_bab


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.

[Mizar]

Franko:

I eagerly await your results of if your test gets your 2.5" HDs to work!  x56h34 recently said a Seagate 80GB and Hitachi 40GB worked for him with only an A500 PSU.  Have any of the drives you've tested been Seagate or Hitachi?

My more powerful PSU has 6.5A on the 5V line, 2A on 12V, and .5A on -12V (as compared to the A500 PSU is 4.5A on 5V, 1A on 12V, and .1A on -12V), yet it didn't spin up the WD 80GB one.  I also have the 1230 accelerator card, a high density floppy drive, an external scan doubler, and Surf Squirrel drawing power from it.  I wonder if it would spin up with those disconnected.  How much current have you tested the HDs with so far?

Daedalus:

Have you checked what brand HDs you're using yet?  If it's not a power issue, then maybe I should try either a jumper or cutting the IDE lead on line 1.

[Mizar]

Franko:

Thanks for your thorough and scientific testing :-).  All right, so we can rule out a power or master/slave issue.

That leaves the specific standards/modes, or brand of the drives, that must be the cause.  The ATA-100 is the most current standard, I presume?  Even though the one ATA-100 6.5GB drive worked, maybe there is something about the standard that only kicks in with double digit GB capacities, and causes no incompatibilities with single digit GB capacities.

You hadn't tried Seagate or Hitachi drives, so maybe the right brand can sometimes be compatible even with double digit size.

Or possibly there is some other difference with the big drives not present in smaller ones.  Someone had recently mentioned spin speed as a factor.  But I'm not sure how that would matter unless they required such a large startup current that the floppy and PC power supplies you tried still weren't adequate.

Those are all my ideas.  So, it looks like I better get a less than double digit GB drive, or less than 30GB at least, if I want one that will spin up.  Unless I can find a Seagate or Hitachi maybe :-).  Or there's CF drives- I wonder if those work at 30GB+.

[Mizar]

psxphill:

My last HD was a Fujitsu 1.5GB, but it was fast enough spinning up to work with a cold boot.  The IBM HD I had before that was slower spin up, so I had to reboot like you're saying.

It doesn't appear to be any power issue, and there's a WD HD of the same model I tried (just different capacity) on Vesalia, plus Daedalus has the same model (just different capacity) working on his A1200.  So I think you may be right it could be the IDE cable.

Daedalus:

Thanks for checking on your drives.  That Western Digital Scorpio is the exact same drive I tried, just different size, the WB800BEVE 80GB.  There's also a WB3200BEVE 320GB one listed on Versalia in the Amiga section.  Yet the 80GB one didn't spin up at all.  The drive was new, it's got to be compatible, the power has got to be sufficient, so I think it's got to be the IDE cable with the problem.

Quoting Franko:

> Using FastATA MKII and ATA3.driver Ver8.x, every drive I have tested (various sizes and
> manufacturers) up to 500GB all work perfectly at PIO4...

> Whereas with the 4xEIDE board on various set ups I've had quite a few problems trying to
> get them to recognise HDs bigger than 60GBs...

Franko:

This is from another thread to do with the A1200 IDE interface.  I don't understand, you've been saying nothing larger than 6.5GB has worked, but here you're saying up to 60GB or 500GB works.  Is this only with 3.5" drives, or because of an IDE enhancement board?

I'm noticing also, other users are showing 30GB+ drives they have working on their A1200.  Such as: rvo nl, psxphill, and Daedalus.  Were those Toshiba 30GB and 60GB drives the only ones you tested that didn't work?

Wow, what're you doing that 1TB isn't enough space?

I'd be interested to know if the Western Digital 2.5" HDs work for you too, if you test those.

[Mizar]

I'm going to be installing a new 2.5" WD3200BEVE 298GB drive in my A1200 shortly.  I know that model should work, the 32.5 W PSU should be plenty, so if there's problems with this one too it must be the IDE cable or otherwise the master/slave business.  I should be able to get another cable locally, so if there's still issues does anyone happen to know on what position I should put a jumper on those 4 extra pins on the HD connector?

[Mizar]

Be very interested to know if it works...

PS:the WD3200BEVE is 320GB not 298GB, how did you arrive at that figure

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.

[Mizar]

Claw22000:

It wasn't installed upside down.  I was careful to note how it was oriented and plugged in.  Besides, if it was upside down, you couldn't even secure it to the drive cradle because your screw holes would be facing up.

Amikit sells cables.  On Western Digitial drives "NO Jumper" Means Cable select.  If you have one drive and a cable with One plug then it will auto to master.  If you have 2 plugs on the cable use the one closes to the MB as that is the master plug.  Also if you have 2 drives make sure you have the second one set to Cable select as forcing to slave won't work they both need to be Cable select for this setup to work.

I really hope you get this working as I love my A1200 with a huge drive in it!  Its like unlimited space!

Yeah I know, it turns out if I needed an IDE cable, I couldn't find one locally, so I would've had to order one through AmigaKit.  But there wasn't anything wrong with my cable.  I've only been trying to install 1 HD in there.  From what some other members had said, it sounded like there could be a chance of a master/slave issue, even though like you say it should normally default to master with one drive and no jumper.  So that's why I asked about that, just in case.  But, I noticed now that my IDE cable is already cut on line 1 (if the line furthest towards the front of the machine on the cable is #1)- must've been the dealer who installed a previous HD, presumably.  So, that's supposed to take care of any potential master/slave issue right there.

The WD3200BEVE 2.5" 298GB drive installed successfully!!!  The WD800BEVE 74.5GB one I tried must've been DOA, because I did everything the same when I tried that installation.  And that was also a brand new drive.  They get destroyed so easily if someone mishandles them somewhere along the line, apparently.

The only problem with it now is, despite having AmigaOS3.9, it only recognizes 7GB of space.  Also, it doesn't have an inactivity time shut it down... not sure if it's supposed to do that- stay on whenever the computer has power.  Actually, in one spot HDToolBox shows "127.9G", but only 7GB is available for use.  Pretty odd.  That's still 4 & 2/3 times the size of my last drive, LOL!  But, it'd be nice to get it to recognize the rest.  Like you say, with a huge drive in there it's like unlimited space, alright!  And 298GB is particularly gargantuan!!!  UNLIMITED- indeed!

Franko:

So the drive works!  You must've had back luck too with the large drives being the DOA ones.  Order this 298GB WD model brand new, and with a little luck this time your drive will be intact and will work for your A1200.  Then if you compress some of that enormous data, such as the CD and DVD images, perhaps that'd be ample size for you too.  I think they are discontinuing this model, however, as I got it at clearance half-price.  But there are probably some available still.  I saw it on Vesalia recently.

[Mizar]

magnetic:

Unlike some of us here, sounds like you've been very lucky in not ending up with DOA drives.

Cheers Mizar, I'll try and order one today, kinda came to the conclusion that those two disks were DOA after checking through all the specs & technical details there is no real reason that they shouldn't have worked...

298GB will be plenty for my other A1200s as I only need the towered one with it's two 500GB HDs to backup my DVDs and CD ISO files. All my other miggies only contain Amiga specific stuff so 298GB will more than do...

Ah, yes, with just Amiga stuff that size is gigantic alright... to fill that would take downloading half of Aminet maybe, LOL.  The only thing is you'll probably have the same problem as me with the Amiga not recognizing but only 2 1/3 % of the drive space :-(.  So, we'll have to figure out how to use the rest.  I'm reading through the OS Hard Drive Manual, but I'd be surprised if the answer is in there.  Your towered A1200 sees all the 500GB in the two drives though, right?  They're IDE 3.5"?  I wonder what the difference is there.

How do y'all get your 30, 60, 80GB HDs to be fully recognized by OS3.9?

[Mizar]

@ Mizar

If you use either the 4xEDIE or the FASTATA MKIII buffered interface boards they automatically split the first part of you HDs up into 4GB partitions that use up 8 x 4GBs worth of space...

However on my 500GB Drives I use SmartFileSystem and once installed on the HDs RDB you can use any size of HD and any size of Partition...

I Only use FFS partitions in the first 4GB space on the Master HD to boot up into OS3.1, OS3.5 or OS4.0 ...

Are there buffered IDE interface boards still available?  I haven't seen any yet.  My HD transfer rate is inordinately slow around just 190KB/sec. :-(.  I'm not sure why, but maybe one of those boards could fix that.

Ah, SmartFileSystem is the key!  I'd heard that can have certain drawbacks, but it sounds essential if one wishes to use a huge HD.  It doesn't look like it's on Aminet, where do you get it?

PS. OS4.0 on your A1200, aye?  Cool!  It must have manageable system requirements for well expanded classic systems.

[Mizar]

@ Mizar

I've only seen them on eBay these days, I've bought two 4xEIDE boards on eBay over the past few weeks, they only speed up HD access slightly to about 250kb/sc but they make managing an HD and adding extra drives HD/CD/DVD a doddle...

The best board though is the FastATA MKIII, but again you'd have to find one on somewhere like eBay but the FastATA  MKIII will take you're HD speeds up to around 500 to 600kb/sec (depending on your processor), I've only seen one in the past month on eBay but got outbid on it...

SmartFileSystem used to be on AmiNet as it was released into the public domain years ago by the author, however you can still find it here at the authors own website...

SmartFileSystem Ver 1.279

OS4.0 on an A1200 requires a PPC accelerator but without an RTG board as well it's slower than a dead donkey...

You seem to be implying that my slow 190KB/sec. rate is normal, but in that IDE interface thread it was said it should be more like 2MB/sec. or higher with an 030 and original A1200 IDE interface.  I have an 030/40MHz, 882/50 MHz.

Yeah, I remember the FastATA MKIII sounded like the best from the other thread.  I guess I'll have to add that to my list of items that I want that can only be aquired secondhand, along with a PPC accelerator, RTG board, and PCI/Zorro-II slots.  ;-)

Cool... when I downloaded SFS the slightly older main archive link was directed from Aminet.  Don't know why it didn't show up in my Aminet search the other day.

[Mizar]

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...

Whoops, I didn't see this one yet.  Whoah, what they did is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of!  Why don't they just go and change a definition from what it's always been, to say nothing of different from what computers actually use.  They had no business trying to change Gigabytes into something they're not.  Their Gibirishbytes is what they should've made into the absurd marketing definition, and left Gigabytes alone.  I've never even heard of all those Gibi, Mebi, etc. nonsense words before.  What's next, we start calling apples oranges, and vice versa?
:angry:

Of course you don't like it, how could anyone in their right mind like that.  That's entirely worse than when they changed the meaning of the word planet.  I say we all should band together in a united front against official stupidity!!!  I say it's 298 Gigabytes, and 320 Gibirishbytes!  And so does my computer, so there.
:furious:

As for the WD Scorpios, it's no wonder they don't cause any power issues even with the standard PSU.  I think they're exceptionally power efficient, just like they're so quiet.  They're designed for use in battery powered computers afterall.