SSD for A1200

[Mrs Beanbag]

I'm thinking of investing in a solid state drive for my Amiga.  Its 1.2Gb drive is getting on a bit now, it's all backed up on my PC but I have nightmares about it failing.

Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware?

Also what would be the best/easiest way to reinstall all my things on a new drive?  I gather there are programs for Linux that will write Amiga partition tables and file systems.  My Amiga does have a network card.

[Mrs Beanbag]

A real SSD would be a big waste of money IMHO. A CF-IDE adapter and a CF card with 20x speed (ca. 3 MB/s) is sufficient. Every faster device would be slowed down by the Amiga's IDE port.

To copy the data, you should connect both drives to the same computer. I would recommend WinUAE for the job, but you didn't mention Windows.

I was looking at this one:
http://www.xstra.eu/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=844&category_id=265&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=3&lang=en

that's a fairly small waste of money if you ask me but a CF card could have its advantages.

I don't run Windows, I run Linux and I don't have UAE installed at the moment (I do all my Amiga stuff on real Amigas).  It might be simplest just to make a boot disk with HD tools and AmiTCP on it.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate

There's no way I'm ever going to get close to using 1 Gb let alone 4, so "four times the capacity" isn't really a selling point.  Quiet and fast, that I like the sound of.  I'm mainly just conscious that my existing HD isn't going to last forever.  An industrial grade SSD has its appeal, to me, over a compact flash card which isn't really intended to be used this way.  The money isn't that much of a problem (heck I can drink that much money in an evening).  The thing I care about most is reliability.

TRIM only needs to come in after you write to the drive a lot.  I don't imagine that is ever going to be a factor, either, and even when it does come in it's only to restore it back to original speed.  I don't know about this but I suspect the reliability issues with PCs are caused by the high throughput the devices have to endure from modern operating systems.

[Mrs Beanbag]

You can install a cf easy with a real amiga, dont need to use emuls, if you have any problem with hdtoolbox theres some hdtoolbox for cf for prepare it like any other hd, i have it in somewhere on a disk, if you need it tell me.

I just noticed AmigaKit are selling them pre-formatted with an install disk, which sounds convenient.  I might consider that, as well as a PCMCIA card reader.