a2000 adding a cdrom

[23703jim]

o.k. now that i see about adding a cd to my 1200 lets see if this might be a better idear (money wise) i have a 2000 configured like so. a 30 mhz accelerator card 2630, 2091a scsi card with a 1 gig hard drive and 4 megs on board and a ram card with 4 megs for a total of 8 megs and 1 meg video memory. i have one diskdrive installed and room for one more diskdrive (why do i need it?) and room for a cd rom drive. i believe (correct me if i am wrong, get a scsi ribbon cable from the board to the harddrive and then carry it over to the cd rom drive (am i right so far? plug in power and then use (i have asim cdfs vs three (3). right? would you tell me what brand and model cd rom drive shud i use (scsi that is)to give me the least amount of trouble configuring it.
if i am wrong please let me know, i am new at adding cd rom drive to amiga.
my regards to all who read this and for those who render me there xpertise in this delicate operation.

regards james

[doctorq]

Any SCSI CD drive should work with the A2091. As you say yourself, get a ribbon cable, connect it to a 50 pin SCSI drive, plug in power cable and install software.

Most CD drives has a termination jumper, so set this one, and a unit number and you should be fine.

[Argus]

Just about any scsi cd rom should work, I've found Toshiba and Sony units work the best.  NEC units don't seem to work with PlayCD for whatever reason (if you're planning on using the freebie AmiCDFS cd file system).  Get at least a 2x or better yet a 4x or 8x (that should be plenty fast enough).

[Amiga4k]

doctorq,

  Brilliant observation on SCSI. An open-ended opinion!

Jim -- the AsimWare CDFS disk is a treasure trove of information. There is a drive list and a card list. This takes a lot of the mistakes out of the selection.

Although other drives "might work", your guess is no better than doctorq's, who is really guessing with "your" money.
I personally knew the AsimWare team up in Canada. Great guys. They took the time and restraint to test these drives and various cards.
As for termination, you'll have to remove the terminator pacs off the hard drive. Then the SCSI CD drive is set to terminated. Be sure the CD drive ID is not the same as the hard drive.
Also, I would not over-look an external SCSI CD drive. With an added SCSI card to the A1200, you could use the CD drive with either system.

PS> Why you didn't buy a 6 or 7 CD changer with your previous purchase is "now" a mystery. I would have installed it to work with the card for you!

[doctorq]

Brilliant observation on SCSI. An open-ended opinion!

I'm guessing that you aren't aware that SCSI controllers aren't as limited as IDE controllers?

Although other drives "might work", your guess is no better than doctorq's, who is really guessing with "your" money.

What's this crap about??? Guessing with his money??? Most, if not all 50 pins drives will work with the A2091 SCSI controller. Just don't use AsimCDFS, and use CacheCDFS or AmiCDFS instead. If the machine has Kickstart 1.3, BabelCDFS is the only filesystem that will work, as the others require Kickstart 2.x or above.

[Argus]

Other than the aforementioned problem with an NEC 2x scsi drive and PlayCD (incompatibility is mentioned btw in the AmiCDFS documentation), I've never had a problem with installing a 50-pin scsi cdrom drive to gvp, A2091 or other controllers.  I've used AsimCDFSv3.10, AmiCDFS and the built-in scsi cd support with OS3.9.  Not to say anything bad about Asimware (great software, btw) but the only cd problems I've had are with ide drives using the Asimware atapi.device on an A4000.  I recommend using IDEfix97 and AmiCDFS for better atapi compatibility, but that's just my experience.