Compactflash Hard disk

[jimmy_n]

Just got a compactflash to 2.5" ide adapter fitted to my A1200.  I'm using an Impact 128Mb card., and want to use it as my main bootable drive.

After a few attempts at setting up the card using HDToolbox, I finally got the drive working ok.  Before that, I kept getting lots of checksum errors after formatting, and sometimes the drive wasn't detected at all.  But I must have done something differently cos it then started to work ok.

I managed to unLha my old HD contents onto the drive, and everything was working great... I could surf the net with no noise coming from the A1200 at all, and the disk access was pretty fast.  After a few reboots it was still working fine.

Then, after switching the machine off and a few hours later back on again, I was greeted with 'DH0: is not a dos disk' upon switching on the machine.  Switching on and off again, same thing.  Does anyone know what might be causing this, and will I have to format and reinstall everything again (is it worth it?)  :-?

[dauber]

My advice is basically do NOT use CompactFlash as an everyday hard drive -- those things go corrupt so quickly. They're good for transferring files from one computer to another, but not much else. Too much activity at once can jumble those things, requiring a reformat.

[Castellen]

At work we use the proper IDE flash based hard drives.
They're pretty low capacity (60Mb or something) but I've never seen one go corrupt.

We use them in older PCs which run as dedicated digital audio switch controllers in trunked radio networks.
Basically the computer boots a DOS application from the hard drive when it first powers up, and runs continuously with the occasional read/write to the drive.

They plug directly into the 40 way 3.5" type IDE cable, and there is a small adaptor cable which supplies power to the drive.


You may want to try something like this?
Might not be a good idea as a primary drive, as flash memory has a limited number of write cycles, typically 100000 or so.  Lots of writes like to a web browser cache for example would quickly clock up the number of writes.

[Hyperspeed]

On another thread there was a big discussion about this and the
concensus was that they do get corrupted.

Also the adaptors are occasionally incompatible with the Amiga IDE
interface.

There's a file on Aminet that shows you how to set up a PCMCIA drive
using a SCSI card reader.

You can also get solid state drives that do not fragment.
I think they're from www.simpletech.com.

They come in 800Mb and 2Gb sizes and are very fast.

[jimmy_n]

Thanks for the advice.  I've heard of peoples success using CF cards as a DH0:, but maybe they never got round to mentioning the bit where the CF card corrupts.  Saying that, could it be because I'm using a cheap brand CF card?

>>You can also get solid state drives that do not fragment.
>>I think they're from www.simpletech.com.
>>
>>They come in 800Mb and 2Gb sizes and are very fast.

Hyper, where can you get these from, tried looking up some info on the net and they were saying like $2000 for a 2Gig one, maybe not. I can't really use a PCMCIA drive as my ethernet adapter uses the PCMCIA port.

Thinking about getting a microdrive now - expensive though compared to 2.5" HD, but apparently very quiet so I might try and get one cheap off ebay.

[MiAmigo]

I saw in another thread here a few days ago, where someone was saying a CF card could be used as the RAM disk. If true, wouldn't that be a better use of the technology, and woudln't the Amiga really benefit from such a huge, fast amount of volatile RAM? Even just 32MB would be great.

[Hyperspeed]

$2,000 for the 2Gb? That has to be a sign that they're "the dog's"...
however that is too expensive for us.

The 800mb ones go on eBay quite regularly and I think they're only
about $60 USD. That's sixty!

There were two brands, one of them was SimpleTech so use that as a
keyword. The other was SiliconTech 800Mb 2.5" flash drives. They're
the thickness of a floppy and have a row of standard IDE port pins on
them.

I've seen Amiga 1200s for sale with built-in SiliconTech 800Mb disks
after following a link on Amiga.org. They look fantastic.

As for using a CompactFlash as a RAM Disk - that would be incredibly
slow. The Mitsubishi Melcard PCMCIA memory cards that the PCMCIA slot
is designed for (Sys:Tools/Prepcard) will run at 160Ns/200Ns which
compared to 60Ns FastRAM is very slow indeed. Take into account that a
Melcard is SRAM which is a kind of perishable RAM...

The CompactFlash cards aren't perishable upon power-down and take a
lot longer to write to in electronics terms.

Even the 2Mb Melcards were only really of use as storage mediums as
when they were used as RAM: they would slow things down a lot.

If you want another example, think of how long it takes to save a game
on Dreamcast compared to N64. The VMs use flash memory of some sort
whereas the N64 paks have battery backup. Faster but less safe should
you drop one on a hard surface or the battery runs down.

:-)

I wouldn't mind getting a Subway USB adaptor for the A1200 though,
those 128Mb USB pens are cheap as chips!

;-)

[adolescent]

jimmy_n wrote:

Thinking about getting a microdrive now - expensive though compared to 2.5" HD, but apparently very quiet so I might try and get one cheap off ebay.

Beware that the Microdrives only transfer at about 1M/s.  If you're going to be using it in an A1200 then you'll definately notice the slowness.  (Although, if you thought the normal CF was okay then you're probably be okay).