Conner HD to instal in A500

[RMC64]

I have an old conner pc formatted drive. what would it take to get it connected to an Amiga 500?

[Thomas]

You cannot connect a HDD directly to an A500, you need a HDD controller first. Software to install a HDD usually comes with the controller.

Bye,
Thomas

[melott]

I think most HD controllers for the A500 were SCSI
although some were IDE.

I assume the drive you are talking about is IDE, so
when looking for a controller make sure its compatable
with your drive.
It should work fine then.

[Floid]

I seem to remember the TrumpCard being the most popular IDE solution at the time; that let you install the IDE drive in place of the floppy, and switch to an external floppy...

Not sure what was available in the sidecar category, there were a few as well.

Eaaaarly Conners had a reputation for being fiddly in master-slave relationships; by the 540MB era this was solved, or at least, I never had any problems on my PC equipment.

[kd7ota]

In my opinion, it would be a fatal mistake to even install a conner harddrive. I dont know of that company still exists, but the harddrives are crap.  My brother had a 800mb harddrive at the time, and it died on him easily within a year or so.  I had another onewhich just never booted up ever again. Why not replace the harddrive with a Seagate or even a Western Digital?  Maxtors.... They are faulty too. I had to get rid of the 40gig i had of a Maxtor because it kept making clicking sounds and wouldnt start up somtimes.... My 60gig UATA133 I bought a few months ago makes clicking sounds for no reason. Not sure if there is a fix to this, but I would like to know if there ever is a fix for late harddrive loadups n all of that.  

But if anything, just replace that conner with another harddrive.

[Holley]

Western Digital, Seagate and Fujitsu have all made faulty batches of drives in the past, which have failed after 1 - 2 years of use.  Quantum used to have problems with the spin-up speed in A600s & 1200s.

Choice of a hard disk is going to be on what interface can be found (chances are an old interface will come with a drive anyway), and no one manufacturer is perfect!  I've replaced about 200 Fujitsu 10Gb IDE HDDs with Maxtor 20Gb ones in this last year (supplied under warranty).

[Floid]

Clicks can vary; sometimes it's just safe thermal compensation or even failed-sector remapping (a good thing, at today's densities)... other times, it's varying degrees of horror.  I had a problem with a clicky WD semirecently (80gb WD800AB), and the best theory I could come up with was that power supply voltage was sagging enough to kick in an overly-aggressive protective-parking feature... Had to RMA the first one, and the second behaved the same but without data loss; never did test it by installing a higher-wattage supply, and theoretically I was within spec (just like the 6000RPM-to-goose-the-benchmarks drive was theoretically a low-power 5400RPM)...

Er, back to how much Conner did/didn't suck, I was running a 'naturally selected' one (800-something MB, made right before they were bought up by... who bought them up, Quantum?) that had been in use for about 8 years, with no trouble.  As ever, when a drive does start to go, nothing to do but replace it and hope you have better luck the next go-'round.

[Linchpin]

Conner now owned by Seagate :-)

[Van_M]

I found a Conner hard drive in the the dumpster that's called "lounge" in my house, the other day. I was desperately looking for a medium to keep some 30 gig back-up on... too bad it was only 540 mb! I'll keep on searching in my lounge tonight... who knows, I might come up with a server!

[RMC64]

Thank you Thomas you seem to know a lot.
I will follow your advice