Has anyone tried this on an A1200?

[amyhr]

Hello, this is my first post in these forums, and I had an interesting quesiton for all you Amiga hardware hackers out there:
Has any one tried to replace the hard drive with a Compact Flash to IDE adapter?  

I know this works on regular PC hardware, as the CF card looks just like a small hard drive to the system.  However, small is relative.  Currently, I have a 40 MB (that's megabyte) drive in there, so a 64MB or 128MB CF card would give me a lot more space to "play" with.   I wouldn't worry too much about the write limit of the flash, as I don't think I'd be witing to it that much.  
Benefits would be it's quieter, cooler, lower-power, and faster.

So, what do ya'll think?

ThanX!
a.m.

[Karlos]

To quote another regular visitor

"Welcome to the asylum!"

To be fair, I don't forsee any problem with your approach. If the CF looks just like a HD at the interface level, presumably the A1200 won't know any better.

I expect you'll get some seriously quick boot up times :-)

[odin]

Karlos wrote:
I expect you'll get some seriously quick boot up times :-)

I doubt it. I think the read speeds of modern day harddisks are only limited by the crappy ancient IDE interface. Therefore I wonder how much use it'll be to get one of these flashy thingies on that bus :-).

[Karlos]

@Odin,

I meant compared to his existing 40Mb drive. Something tells me it's not that new ;-)

[bloodline]

Yeah, the CF is really fast, even on the crappy A1200 IDE, it's fastand boots up in no time!!!!

[jeffimix]

sounds like it'd work. Mind you, the Compact Flash card will probably have to be formatted for the amiga's fast file system. So it stays there.

[MarkTime]

CF is not so fast.  It has no moving parts.
It won't do read/write reliably in the long haul, but
some believe a CF boot drive makes some kinds of
devices more reliable for server apps, where they
are doing read only operations, or ocassional updates...like a routing table or something.

A seriously fast CF is 4MB/s  
whereas a seriously fast hard drive can hit 61MB/s transfer rate...yes, thats an expensive 15k scsi drive, high end, and you won't get it on an A1200!

More of a typical 'fast' CF would be 2MB/s-3MB/s, and btw, you can go all the way down to 150k/s so watch what you buy.

The CF would be neat as a boot drive, and seek times I imagine, would be pretty good.

[amigamad]

I myself have a compact flash to ide adaptor i have not tried it yet but i know they work because someone here once posted a link to a modded a1200 that was put in a rack mount case and used as a server. When i had a look one thing i noticed was this type of adaptor which when fitted with a card can be used as a standard hard drive. If you are in the uk search ebay you will find some on there the person that has them on ebay also has a site where you can buy them they cot £19.95  plus postage i paid about £14.00 buy getting one of ebay .It would be reliable with no moving parts it should not wear out .there are compact flash card that are made for these type of adaptors which are higher speed than normal cards and i have seen a 1gig cf card at a shop which sells digital cameras cost was £164.I got my cf to ide for an a1200 . :-D

[amigamad]

Once i got started i did not know when to stop typing sorry if i went on a bit.

[BADHead]

you could use RAD disk if you have enough memory with same effect this will only survive a soft reboot though

[SWAUG]

We had this idea about 18 months ago.  A CF-IDE adapter was purchased from the US and worked. We set up two compact flash cards wih different operating systems and could boot into each when the cards were swapped. The trouble was that these devices are PIO-0 so they slow down all the other devices on the Powerflyer.  This isnt very good when you have a fast PIO-5 capable HD!

[ncafferkey]

The other option is to put the CF card in the PCMCIA slot via an adapter, although it wouldn't be bootable. See disk/misc/cfd.lha on Aminet. Maybe you could use it for your Work partition.

[amyhr]

ThanX everyone!  I think this is definately a project I'll work on, but just today the Amy got packed up as we're moving in a few months, but I'm always fishing for project ideas, which  is why I floated this past everyone.  Once I do try it out, I'll let everyone here know about my expereience with it...

[Dr_Righteous]

I'd definately be interested in hearing about the boot/operation speed increase of using the CF adapter... Might be worth doing to my A4000!

Suddenly I'm envisioning using the CF adapter as the Workbench drive, having everything else on a decent SCSI chain... An overall system speed increase! *mind wonders and wanders*