Hitachi 2,5" drive. Can I use it in A1200D

[doctorq]

Hi guys,

I need some more storage room in my trusty old A1200 Desktop. I found a drive which sounds promissing, and it's the following drive :

Hitachi/IBM 08K0632, TravelStar 80GN, 20 GB

It's based on the fluid technology, so I guess it will be lownoise, which I would like it to be.

The question is if I can use it in my Amiga. My guess is that I can and after installation of SFS I can use the harddrives full capacity. I had troubles with a 6 GB IBM disk once, I couldn't save the changes to the drive, but mayby it was because of a broken disk, I don't know.

Does it mather on the Amiga if its IDE66, IDE100 or IDE133?

Are anyone using this kind of disk, or should I avoid Hitachi and go for another manufacturer of harddrives?

[darksun9210]

Hitachi are good, and as far as the amiga is concerned, it doesn't care if its UDMA33/66/100/133. the drives have to support PIO mode 0, which is what the amiga uses, to be able to boot in the first place, untill what ever OS sorts out its chipset drivers to support the higher speed modes. thats my understanding.

have had no problem accessing a 20Gb UDMA133 and 100Gb UDMA100 drive on my os 3.0 A1200. just a shame that the 3.0 roms would only allow me to see the first 8gb of them :/ but then i'm not sure if that was a FFS problem or a rom problem.  :-)

[doctorq]

as far as the amiga is concerned, it doesn't care if its UDMA33/66/100/133.

Yeah, I was almost positive about that one, but better safe than sorry :-)

just a shame that the 3.0 roms would only allow me to see the first 8gb of them

Are you sure that it's 8 GB and not 4? The normal saying is that Amiga can't support drives larger than 4 GB. Have you tried installing SFS or PFS? It should do the trick.

[darksun9210]

yeah it puzzeled me too. it gave me two 4096mb 'areas'. the first area was +numbers, and the second area was -numbers.

i have a 5.1Gb drive in there at the moment (3.0 rom, 4.8gb formated capacity) and if you open the drive, it tells me that it is an 800Mb drive (the bit over the 4Gb limit).

when i stuck the 100Gb drive on my A4000T 3.1 roms OS3.5 update, it thought it was a 36Gb drive. again, not sure if it was a filesystem problem or rom issue.

[voytech]

I used to have a 60 gb hdd hooked to my miggy.
As standard only first 4GB of the drive was accessible (without any read errors), for the rest of it's space, I used PFS3 on it, without any problems.. And remember to format partitions that are above 4GB with quick mode. I formatted this disk once with verify format mode, and it screwed fs on it..

[doctorq]

Thanks, I'll remember that. Mayby I should just go for the Hitachi drive then.

 @darksun9210
Try downloading HDInstTools from Aminet. This will give you the correct sizes for your HD. HDToolBox told my that my 6 GB HD was a -1998 MB harddrive! But I still can't save my changes to the drive though :-(