A2000 HD Controller Question

[nimtene]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my previous
post about the DCTV. It was extremely useful!

I'm hoping someone can help me with this problem as
well. I opened up my A2000, and took a look inside.
I see a harddrive mounted next to the floppy drive.
It's an older style cable with a 34 Pin Connector
and a 20 Pin Connector, not connected to anything.
So, I'm wanting to connect it to the Motherboard.
I can see where the floppy connects to it, but I
don't see where this HD would connect. My best guess
would be that the old owner removed the HD Controller
that used to be installed in one of the slots?

Is this right? Can someone lend me a little insight
into this?  Will I need a special Amiga Controller,
or will a PC one suffice? Is there a special name for
these Controllers, that I should know? Assuming
the HD is working, and intact, and I find a controller
for it, is there anything that would prevent me from
booting up to this HD, and accessing the current
contents?

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it!
 

 

[Matt_H]

Sounds like an ST506 drive, absolutely ancient. Yes, you will need a special Amiga controller to use it. The 2090 is the only one I'm aware of.

[rkauer]

[edited]

 Ooops, Matt comes before me.

 An ST506 hd don't carries  too much data, better donate it to junkyard or a museum.

 For better use of your A2k, buy an IDE HD (cheapest way), but you need a Zorro II IDE controller (none peecee would work).

 But probrably you only find a SCSI controller. In this case you need a SCSI HD (or even an accelerator board WITH a SCSI HD).

 Look at ebay for A2000 accelerators. They are not expensive (if the processor is <68040), thought. GVP Combos are the best for the A2k, IMHO.

[Ami_GFX]

The drive was connected to a 2090 controller. It is a small drive--50mb at the most most likely and slow even by 1990s standards. It would be much better to get a newer SCSI controller--an A2091 at least and a 500mb-1gb scsi drive. This would give you a fairly usable system and wouldn't cost that much. The controller might cost you $50 or so but the disk would cost you next to nothing. There are many different HD controllers for the A2000. Read about some of them at the Amiga Hardware Database. There are 2 or 3 listed on Ebay at the moment--a 2091 and a Dataflyer and maybe 1 or 2 more.

[Tenacious]

Good info from Ami_GFX.  I would add to be mindfull of what version of the OS and other expansions you will want to use.  SCSI controllers are probably the best but they all have an onboard rom (in addition to the one on the motherboard).  These roms had to be upgraded for best efficiency or to work at all with newer stuff.  Some used  controllers have already been upgraded.  I wish I could be more specific, but others here have more experience with this.  

 There are still SCSI CD Rom drives, writers, scanners available on e-Bay.

[Darrin]

Just get a Buddha IDE controller from Individual Computers and use a cheap cast-off PC hard drive and CD ROM.

You can buy them new from most existing Amiga dealers.  Forget SCSI, unless you can pick up a SCSI card on eBay with some extra RAM fitted.

[Ami_GFX]

Forget SCSI, unless you can pick up a SCSI card on eBay with some extra RAM fitted.

SCSI rocks if you set it up right. And since this is obviously an older A2000 with older--telling us which version would be helpful--kickstart, I would say that going from an A2090 to an A2091 controller would be the easiest way to go. The A2091 was designed for this machine. I have been buying SCSI drives from around $1-$5 locally--and $5 got me 3 18gb 80 pin server drives that I can use with my Flyer along with all the cables and terninators. There are also GVP accelerators with built in SCSI. One of these would do wonders for you.

[nimtene]

Exactly what I needed to hear.
Thanks again for all your help!