External Disk Drive For A500

[Astral]

An SD card based HXC floppy emulator housed in whatever it fits in

[smerf]

I just bought a Gotek drive off of Ebay for my Amiga. Don't need an external drive no more, just use a usb stick, I have all my adf programs on my PC, copy them on the usb then insert it into the Gotek floppy emulator. It is so cool, a little slow, but you can have probably 100 disks on each stick, all you have to do is remember the order of the program disks and put in the number when your running program asks for disk 2, disk 3 or whatever. Solves the problem of a hard disk, and magnetic floppy disks which are disappearing or going bad.

but please.

Know what you are buying before you buy, the Goteks are made for different things, so if you are looking for an Amiga drive, buy Amiga, if you are looking for a Roland buy a Roland drive or else know some thing about electronics so you can set it up or watch youtube on how to set a Gotek up for different uses.

This product is smerf approved, and you all know it is hard to make smerf happy.

Well back to dumping programs on my Gotek floppy drive emulator, and using a LCD or LED monitor, with my Video converter to replace Amiga 1200 2000 RGB monitor to connect to LCD CRT.

The Gotek and the Video Converter have made my using Amiga's a much, much more pleasurable experience. Ok, it is not a $200 special made board for the Amiga, but what I see is for around $30 I can use the 23 pin video connector on the back of any Amiga, plug in the video converter board, plug in my crt, lcd, led, monitor and use it flicker free and very good video output, and then with my drive, look up on my list for my usb stick and see what game or program I want to run. If my USB stick ever crashes, (didn't happen yet) I just go back to my adf external hard disk on my PC, see what programs are associated with numbered USB stick and re-install them. Another nice thing about the video converter is that I can also use it on my old Nintendo, Atari, Sega Genesis, or whatever. So it does multiple duties just like the multi tasking Amiga.

Well hope you enjoyed my post, and BTW if you are looking for a CF card or sandisk adapter look on ebay, I bought 5 of them already anywhere from $1 to $5. OK I am retired now and have to think cheap, but I have more time to fool around with fishing, computers, mountain biking, boating, winter activities, woodworking and electronics.

and on top of it all,

I can come to Amiga Org and smile.

If you think you are having a bad day, watch the movie Lone Survivor, and learn what a bad day really is, then you will realize you don't have it bad at all.

People will fight and die for their beliefs, not realizing it is better to just live and let live and enjoy each others company. I mean I can sit down and talk to an Apple/Mac user without killing him. I mean he has his rights to believe in what he believes, and in all reality,   do I really have to hurt his feeling just because of the color of his screen, or the use of a two button mouse, or those really silly awful keyboards with that disgusting OS, that they say is the next future of an Atari. Naw to Silicon or the future. Whatever it may be.

smerf

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Anything but an A1010.    Big, klunky, and don't support silencing the auto-disk check click.  A1011 matches the A500 fairly well, I always had good luck with Supra drives, otherwise anything you can find on ebay or Amibay (as long as it's tested to work) should be fine.  

[orange]

well, Amiga HD FDDs are nice too as they offer larger capacity, but probably most expensive.

otherwise, I'd go for that 1010, or a slimline with a small LCD that shows current track.

[ajlwalker]

Can anyone tell me the best external disk drive for the A500, need to get a new one.??
Thanks :-)

Another recommendation for the Cumana CAX354 here. Served me well for over a decade and still works over 20 years later.

It has a pass through to daisy chain drives, and also an off switch, which would save you unplugging it.

[danbeaver]

The A1011 as mentioned in the first response is the slim sized (A3000-styled) revision of the A1010 and looks cool  The A1010 is flat out noisy; there are a ton of various slim 1" external FDD's out there on Amibay and eBay, buy two and use one for floppies and take the second out of its case to save as a backup; replace it with a Gotek ($21 USD off eBay and reprogrammed for the Amiga).  The Gotek will give you the option of dozens of ADF files available at a button push.  This give you the best of the Amiga world.

P.S., the Gotek is easily modified and reprogrammed using a $4 USD device in under 30 minutes -- see instruction on the web.  The HxC is expensive and a pain to deal with due to converting the files.