Thinking of adding a Hd to my A500

[arion]

Is it still possible to get an external Hard drive for an amiga 500 ? Or are there other options ?

[sim085]

A few days ago I bought a hard drive for my A500+ so I guess it is still possible to upgrade your A500 with a hard drive. I bought my hard drive from eBay.

Regards,
Sim085

[darksun9210]

yeah do it! there are still a few that pop up on ebay from time to time. a hard disk is one of the best upgrades you can do to your miggy :-)

[rkauer]

 If you are talented enough, you can make an IDE controller for your A500.

 All needed is a small CPLD, a pair (or just one) of 68000 CPU sockets and the IDE header, plus a newer kickstart (37350 will suffice). Oh, and the board!:-)

[arion]

Since i have never even dared to open an amiga case i doubt i´ll be able to make my own ide controller anytime soon at least.

So when it comes to ebay what should i look for in hard drives for an amiga 500 any particular brand names or something like that keywords i should be aware of for example.

Any help would be great and i realize i have a lot to learn about amigas

[alexh]

http://www.students.tut.fi/~leinone3/ide/ide68k.html

[darksun9210]

otherwise, search ebay or amibay for an "amiga GVP"
this should hopefully bring up a few things.
what you're after is an A500 GVP impact HD8+ or similar.
its a box that bolts onto the side of your A500 that has a scsi controller, hard disk, and upto 8MB extra ram. i wouldn't expect to pay more than 50 GBP for one.

i see on ebay at the moment, there is a GVP A530. its the same as an HD8, but it also has a 40Mhz 68EC030 cpu and 68882 fpu in there to speed up your machine. - these accelerators are fairly wanted bits of kit, hence the scary price!  :-D

[roguebeck]

 I have a trumpcard500 external drive and sidecare for the a500 on ebay currently.

The trumpcard500 also has a Meta4 Ram expansion card in it that takes 30 pin simm ram.

 It made my a500 quite the little machine!

PM me if you want the link to that auction or check in the Marketplace forum.

[alexh]

darksun9210 wrote:
what you're after is an A500 GVP impact HD8+ or similar.
its a box that bolts onto the side of your A500

You might need a new wider desk too. ;-)

The cheapest hard drive addon for an A500 is an A600 or an A1200 :-)

[darksun9210]

fair point, i'd not considered that option.  :lol:

expand your A500! buy an A1200!

and yes, you do loose room with it. my desk fits a keyboard and a mouse, but the sideport addon for my A500 eats up my mousing space. pain in the arm/shoulder, as i now have to stretch to mouse ontop of the A500 :roll:

not the most ergonomic, but the reason i got an A500 again is it's the machine i started with. so i'm sentimental i guess... plus the A1200 is too easy to expand. lol :-)

[rkauer]

 @Darksun9210:

 Wanna trade your girlfriend for my wife?

 Yeah, I had to add a wider desk to the computers room just for the expanded A500 I have (the A2000 is used as a monitor stand :-D).

 Now the 500 will have (in a very close future) 020 accelerator, SCSI HD, ZIP drive and SCSI scanner (no, no ethernet).

[arion]

I'll probably end up doing both adding a hd to my a500 and getting an a1200  :-D

A question about a1200 do they come with an Hd or is it simply easier to add one ?

[countzero]

it has an internal ide port, so you can add 2.5 inch ide devices.

1200hd models came with hdd, but there's no point really as the hdds are now broken or full with bad sectors. get a CF/IDE adapter and you're all set.

[N3vpd]

Where might one get the info for the controller     Thanks@

[Lockon_15]

http://www.iki.fi/mkl/ide/ide68k.html