ATA = IDE?

[lurkist]

I am in the market for a new IDE hard drive after a minor explosion wiped out my last one.  I am seeing lots of potentially suitable drives on eBay, but the majority say ATA.  Will these work with 4-way IDEfix 97?  Do i need the thinner ATA cable?  I once tried an ATA cable with my CDROM and CR-RW and it didn't work.
Cheers!

[lurkist]

Also are there specific drives known to work with IDEFix 97?  How about the Quantum Fireballs,  the Western Digital Caviars, etc.

[bloodline]

lurkist wrote:
Also are there specific drives known to work with IDEFix 97?  How about the Quantum Fireballs,  the Western Digital Caviars, etc.

ATA = IDE (or at least it has for the last 10years). Make sure it has 40 pins :-D

[mikeymike]

All IDE (not SATA) drives I've seen are backwards compatible with traditional IDE 40-pin cables, they simply don't do =>UDMA66 with the traditional cables.

[JaXanim]

I've bought several IDE drives via eBay and they've all worked fine on my A1200/IDE adapter. I think what you must watch out for is bidding on second hand (or even new) drives and going well beyond the price+delivery you'd pay to a commercial supplier advertising in computer magazines (eg MicroMart).

It's been discussed around here several times, but people bidding on eBay often get carried away trying to win an item they could order directly from a commercial website at a cheaper cost. If you enjoy the challenge of eBay, go ahead and have fun, but set yourself a budget price for anything as common as a hard drive. I've just won a second hand Samsung 40Gb drive and now see a brand new 40Gb Maxtor advertised by a major supplier for five pounds less.

Cheers,

JaX

[itix]

It is not recommended to use old 40 wire cables on Pegasos, though. They are not supported.

[lurkist]

It's okay, i'm well versed in the finer points of eBay shopping, i have taken a chance and bought a 6 gig Fujitsu 7200 rpm for under a tenner.  As long as it goes, i'll be happy!

Thanks for the responses,

lurkist

[CatHerder]

Your amiga doesn't know exactly what to do with drives that big, you'll either have to make multiple 3GB partitions on it, or run 3rd party software with it. Just thought I'd mention that, in case you didn't know, so you don't go set up a 500MB workbench and a 6.5GB Work and end up getting mysteriously corrupted stuff a couple weeks later on the work: partition. :-)

[Thomas]

you'll either have to make multiple 3GB partitions on it

This is not entirely true. You can make the partitions as big as you like. However, you cannot use more than 4GB of the drive.

So make one 500MB system partition and one 3.4GB work partition and leave the rest empty, then it will run without problems.

To address the remaining parts (2GB in your case), you need additional software. You need a replacement IDE driver and a replacement file system.

So if someone suggests SFS or PFS3 as a solution, this is only half the truth, you need IDEfix or OS3.5/3.9, too.

Bye,
Thomas

[lurkist]

I have both OS3.9 and IDEFix 97 (see my sig), and generally i keep a partition called "Cache" in addition to Work and WB, so if WB was 500 MB, Work was 3.5 Gig, and Cache was 2 Gig, i am covered on all bases...?  It's just the ATA compatability issue that concerns me.
Cheers

[SHADES]

Not only this. All of the clasic AMIGAs seem to NOT be able to use DMA for IDE hard disks.
What this means is that ATA 133MB/s is not going to happen, infact neither will the 100/66/33 modes either.
The AMIGA clasic using even that 3rd party IDE thingy still can only use the PIO modes of the drive. I think from memory that PIO 4 is the fastest mode available on IDE thesedays which does maximum 12.5 MB/sec.
PIO modes use the CPU for all transfers to and from the hard disk. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access which is an attempt to make the PCI bus and logic do the CPU work direct to memory and leave the CPU out so it can do other things.

The higher speed ATA modes are what prompted a cable design change, so you could use an older cable without any problems on that drive if it's plugged into a clasic AMIGA cause it won't be using any of the newer features (faster speeds) of todays drives. That's if you can get past the size barrier as well mind you. lol

[patrik]

@SHADES:

*does some editing too*

The classic Amigas that features an IDE-interface (A600, A1200 and A4000) does as you say not utilize anything else than PIO-modes. Not strange as they are constructions from the ATA-1 era and are made to be highly cpu-driven. This gives slow speeds and a high cpu-load, but it has given a lot of flexibility allowing support for 4-device-hacks, large harddrives to be added afterwards.

Wether the harddrive-controller uses DMA to access the computers memory has nothing to do with if the harddrive-controller access the harddrive using an UltraDMA-mode. You could have a harddrive-controller accessing the computers memory using DMA, but still only accessing the harddrive with PIO-mode 0. Ofcourse the opposite is also possible - a harddrive-controller not being able of doing DMA, instead needing the cpu to transfer data to the computers memory but still accessing the harddrive using an UltraDMA-mode.

See the harddrive-controller as a bridge between the harddrive and the bus the harddrive-controller is connected to the computer via.


/Patrik

[SHADES]

@Patrik
Yeah, I got to look at what I post before posting. I must have edited that 5 times lol.