solid state drives

[systmcrsh]

howdy. i had a problem booting my a600 over the weekend from an internal 2.5" hard drive. im pretty experienced with hard drive failures. im pretty sure some sectors on the disk are going bad... leaving the machine on for ~10 minutes it eventually booted, probably after many read-retries.

anyways, im gonna replace the disk - options being either another 2.5" HD, or a compact flash/ide solution. however the price of SSDs are falling and i found a 2GB IDE SSD for $49 made by transcend. im sure its performance isn't on par with the more expensive SSDs, but i'd think it would be more than adequate for an amiga.

i've heard of some people having problems with transcends compact flash cards though, and was curious of anyone's experiences with them.

i'm assuming that if the 2GB SSD fully complies with the IDE standard it should work in an amiga. right?

[darksun9210]

i should think so. is that one of the ones that looks like a black block of plastic that plugs into the IDE port? shouldn't be a problem as i'd think it should be in "IDE mode" from the factory, as opposed to some compact flash cards.... not that i'm against CF cards. using 4 of them myself... :-)

[Metalguy66]

Yeah. Ive used the transcend 40 pin (standard desktop paralell IDE connector) flash devices. They are great. They perform exactly like a CF card of the same capacity. I believe they also make them in the 44pin (notebook IDE standard) variety.

You do need a small adaptor cable to provide power to the transcend module.

On the 40-pin IDE version, it can take +5v from pin 15 of the IDE connector, but most interfaces do not provide powere here, and this is not part of the IDE standard, so the best deal is to just use the existing internal hardisk power circuit from the A1200, and make a small adaptor cable. Also, Im not sure if the 44pin version can take power from pin 15 or not..

[AmigaHeretic]

Are you talking about these little guys??


Super Talent 4GB 44pin Horizontal IDE Flash Disk Module (MLC)

4GB $32.67

or


4GB Transcend 44Pin Vertical IDE DOM-SMI Module

4GB $47.40


They look pretty cool.  I've heard they work good and you're right they are getting cheaper.

[systmcrsh]

its this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3302787&CatId=3798

i ordered one on my work's corporate account so if it doesnt work i can return it i'll post up here how it goes!

[wawrzon]

i am using several ssd similar solutions on different systems including above flash module and an 2.5 ssd of samsung, not counting different memsticks on deneb usb. only problem i encounter is ssd not booting on csppc scsi. other thtan that works well

[ZeBeeDee]

@systmcrsh

You'll be more than happy with the Transend 2Gb SSD ... Easy to install, partition and format.

They are quiet, good fault tolerance and fairly fast. More than adequate for the A600 HD bus  :-)

[orange]

perhaps it was FFS validating HDD for those 10 minutes?

anyway I'd go for a cheap 2,5" HDD because of space (you might need it)
also SSD will be a lot cheaper soon, so its better to wait and use HDD in meantime.

[a4k-oerx]

Metalguy66 wrote:
...  so the best deal is to just use the existing internal hardisk power circuit from the A1200, and make a small adaptor cable. ..

Another solution: When I put a 3.5" harddisk in my A1200 looong ago, did fit right under the keyboard, parts of the board-shielding had to go, I built a Y-cable for the internal floppy diskdrive power supply to get power to the 3.5" IDE harddisk, worked very fine.

To avoid power problems when I later added a Blizzard 1230-II, I exchanged the external psu to a stronger one of an old A500. The 3.5" harddisk worked for years inside the A1200.

PS. I also built an IDE-cable "adapter" myself (at that time, adapters were not available) by using a standard 3.5" cable, cutting off one connector, splicing the single cables, removing little plastic leftovers between the cables and plugging them by hand in a 2.5" selfcutting connector. Had an exciting time, connecting all this for the first time to the at that time 2 weeks old brand new in the market A1200... and it worked, phew.  :crazy:

[systmcrsh]

orange wrote:
perhaps it was FFS validating HDD for those 10 minutes?

yeah i think this might be the case... i took out the drive and hooked it up to my desktop pc (linux). smart status was ok on boot...

after booting i used dd to clone the drive to a standard 3.5" ide drive: dd if=/dev/amiga of=/dev/clone

dd finished without error. i ran UAE and used the cloned disk as my harddrive. booted up fine, but after a few minutes gave me an error like ... 'error validating Work, block ####'

something like that. right now im running disksalv on the clone in UAE to see what happens.

anyway, im glad that my files were still readable.

oh and btw, im not an expert in amiga & i've always been curious: is there a favorable way to poweroff/shutdown the system? i always just hit the power switch on the powersupply. this just seems really wrong to me.

[darksun9210]

just make sure the system isn't doing anything disk related, and hit the off switch.

nothing wrong with that.   :-)

[systmcrsh]

thought i'd update this thread... this drive works great!

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3302787&CatId=3798

a couple of notes though... had problems with the standard hd install. no problems at all with hdinsttools though.

the above drive is listed as MLC, but the drive itself is labelled by transcend as SLC - not that it makes much of a difference for amigas.

also, this drive - and i suspect other solid state drives - are EXTREMELY susceptible to static discharge damage. i have literally handled thousands of electronics, chips, etc. and have never damaged a component via static discharge. the first drive i recieved worked fine, but when i unplugged it from my pc to install it in the a600 it got damaged somehow and was completely dead --- not anything like a standard drive where sometimes if you mess with a dead drive long enough you can get it to boot 1 more time... this drive died and was dead for good. luckily tiger direct replaced it (dont tell them it was my fault

oh yeah the drive is silent. performance wise its only a bee's penis faster.