A590 and IDE harddisk

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Hello all, I got a question:
Can I put an old 400 meg IDE harddisk in the A590? Currently it contains a 20mb XT disk and as the xt ide is 8 bit and the 400 meg harddisk is most probably 16 bit, I wonder if it was backwards compatible.

[Thomas]

The A590 has XT and SCSI controllers, not IDE. And no, IDE is not backwards compatible to XT.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Thanks for the clear reply
I suspected such as wikipedia stated xt uses the available registers for different purposes. Considering that, one could well destroy the harddisk as disk state flags won't be read properly.
But because of it having the same pinout I was in doubt.

[psxphill]

Thanks for the clear reply
I suspected such as wikipedia stated xt uses the available registers for different purposes. Considering that, one could well destroy the harddisk as disk state flags won't be read properly.
But because of it having the same pinout I was in doubt.

There are rumours that with new software it would be possible, however that's unlikely to happen. You're better off using a SCSI drive, or an IDE to SCSI adapter.

[Zac67]

The XT pinout differs from the ATA (IDE) one.

[psxphill]

The XT pinout differs from the ATA (IDE) one.

It is different, but not drastically. Nothing an hour with a soldering couldn't sort out. It's not worth doing though because the scsi controller is much better.