tcp/ip vs removable drive bay.

[monami]

hi all,

i may have a few removable drive bays heading my way. this may be a better answer than a tcp/ip? how can my pc read the file system on the disk? i have no idea how fast a 10 or 100 network would be. is hours worth of waiting for say a 1gb backup? thanks. :-?

[adolescent]

An external or removable drive is definitely faster, but not as convenient.  You can use a FAT (or FAT32) file system on the Amiga, or use WinUAE on the PC to read a native Amiga file system.

If you have all the parts, then I'd definately say both.  That way you can use the drive for bulk transfers and backups and the network for daily incremental stuff.

[Matt_H]

Are you talking about one of those modern hot-swappable drive bay things? The kind where a whole hard drive gets popped out of a case's drive bay and transferred between machines? I'm not sure the Amiga can use those...

External cartridge drives, like Zip, SyQuest, etc., are fine, of course. The disks are hot-swappable (depending on the SCSI controller), but the drives aren't (since you shouldn't unplug things from an Amiga while it's on). External USB drives are fully hot-swappable, but slower, due to bandwidth limitations.

I think you'll get more out of TCP/IP. Eliminate sneakernet once and for all. And open up the possibility of network printing :-)

[pVC]

You can of course turn the Amiga off when swapping the drive

I've done hotswapping occasionally with SCSI HD on Amiga, but it might not be advisable. Bus rescan is needed with unitcontrol for example to get hotplugged HD shown. But don't try anything like that with IDE at least

For network transfer speeds... with 68k Amiga you can get in optimal config around 1MB/s roughly. With PCI cards. With Zorro cards you probably end up with 600kB/s or like that. With 060.. with 030 don't expect more than 300kB/s So you can count times yourself.