Looking for an A600HD Hard Drive Replacement Guide (n00be)

[CodeHunter]

Hello All,
I am thinking about replacing my current hard drive inside my A600HD and replacing it with different one, either IDE or CF. I need your advice, opinion and suggestions on doing so.

1) Do you know a good guide, for opening up, removing your existing hard drive and replacing it with a new one? Is it a complicated? What tools do I need?

2) Then I can install WB 2.1 on this new hard drive and try your complete package to see if it works for me and make my CF to show up on my WB desktop.

3) Do you know what hard drive size I need?

4) What is the maximum size the my A600HD can handle?

5) Should I go with a CF as an internal hard drive? (instead of a standard IDE) - What are pros/cons of using CF? (instead of a regular IDE)

6) Is there a good guide for formatting or repartitioning an IDE (or CF) hard drive and explaining how to install WorkBench the proper way?

Right now, I am running:

KS 37.350 = 2.05
WB 38.36 = 2.1

Thanks!

[Amiduffer]

The main benefits to a CF card over a hard drive is that it is silent.

Look in the tutorial section of this forum and there is an excellent tutorial on installing a HD in a 1200 and partitioning and installing workbench which will work just as well for your 600.

Kickstart 3.1 and WB 3.9 can handle drives bigger than 4 gigs. Anything below that should be kept to less than 4. But, its an A600, so you don't need a huge HD.

You really should upgrade that thing to KS3.1. Amigakit has the ROM's.

[fishy_fiz]

It's actually pretty straightforward/simple and the only tool you'll need is a phillips heads screw driver. Open up your amiga and have a look. It's quite simlpe/straight forward/logical how to replace it when you look at it. As for CF vs a 2.5inch ide drive, as mentioned the main advantage is the fact its silent. You may find slightly quicker read times on a slower system too (although write speeds might also be a little slower).
Despite what many people seem to believe the 4gig drive limitation is more or less a myth. You can use larger drives with ks2.1 and upwards (maybe even older, but I cant say for sure). The main restriction is boot partition size.

[Gavilan]

Hello All,
I am thinking about replacing my current hard drive inside my A600HD and replacing it with different one, either IDE or CF. I need your advice, opinion and suggestions on doing so.

1) Do you know a good guide, for opening up, removing your existing hard drive and replacing it with a new one? Is it a complicated? What tools do I need?

2) Then I can install WB 2.1 on this new hard drive and try your complete package to see if it works for me and make my CF to show up on my WB desktop.

3) Do you know what hard drive size I need?

4) What is the maximum size the my A600HD can handle?

5) Should I go with a CF as an internal hard drive? (instead of a standard IDE) - What are pros/cons of using CF? (instead of a regular IDE)

6) Is there a good guide for formatting or repartitioning an IDE (or CF) hard drive and explaining how to install WorkBench the proper way?

Right now, I am running:

KS 37.350 = 2.05
WB 38.36 = 2.1

Thanks!

Hi there!
I will try to help you a little here:

1) Check this: http://wn.com/How_to_add_a_Compact_Flash_hard_drive_to_your_Amiga_1200_+_booting

3 & 4) Actually, max capacity is 4GB. If you go beyond...not a good way, unless you have 3.1 roms and install some patches so you can have a huge hdd. Me, for example? I have a 80GB hdd, using WB 3.9 with 2.04 and 3.1 roms installed, which i can change using a homemade switch (for 2.04, i dont use OS 3.9, of course). If you need further asisstance with this, let me know and i will try to be more specific. For me, now its a great idea to replace the old hdd with a modern CF. You can use a 4GB CF and will have plenty of room to fiddle around.

5) GO FOR CF!!! dont hesitate!!! Its the best solution around today. And VERY easy to use/install. You can install some of the already modded and very famous ClassicWB (google it) (IMHO). In 5 minutes you can have a brand new machine running. For ClassicWB, you need WinUAE in one PC. Check it on the net. Or ask again and we will help you

6) http://classicwb.abime.net/ ---> Everything (or almost) is there

Again, ask as many times you need and we will be here to give you a hand

PD: dont forget to check:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wSv53nKdFA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoBF5Gtmv2Y&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZgmsRIJn-o&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEWvxnHdNk&feature=related

Regards

Sebastian

[Franko]

3) Do you know what hard drive size I need?

The size of the HD you require will depend on what you envisage using your Amiga for...

If you only require a small amount of storage space the a Compact Flash type might suit you better...

If you think you'll need countless Gigabytes of space like I do then a proper HD is your best bet...

Never been keen on those CF boards mainly due to the limited size of the cards and I believe they are slower in reading and writing speeds in comparison to a real HD (anyone able to supply some data transfer speeds for a CF board please...)

Either way both are easy to physically install, it's usually the formatting & partitioning where most folk have bother...

[amiga1260]

You could use this guide offline:

http://www.amigascene.nl/modules/artikelen/docs/Amiga1200CF-v0_8_EEE.pdf

[CodeHunter]

Wow, thanks for your replies! I really appreciate them all. Thanks again!

[CodeHunter]

Thanks for your help. Is there a diagram for A600HD? How many screws are there to open?

Thanks!

[a1200]

Also checkout my DOM info here.

There are only like 5 screws to undo on the A600, just be careful not to snap the plastic retainers at the back of the machine when opening the lid.... its an art that even I don't always get right!

[LaserBack]

The main benefits to a CF card over a hard drive is that it is silent.

.

it depends of the hardisk....new 2.5 hardisks are very very silent and are very fast...much faster than any CF card ...about 2.7mb /s on the internal A1200 ide
Last year I installed a new 2.5 ide 80gb hardisk and you don't notice any noise unless you put your ear touching the computer
I still have the original seatgate 120mb hardisk and it works fine but it's like a turbine...unbearable

[kamiga]

it depends of the hardisk....new 2.5 hardisks are very very silent and are very fast...much faster than any CF card ...about 2.7mb /s on the internal A1200 ide

Hrrmmm.. Maybe I'm not understanding something here.

All major manufacturers of Compact Flash cards sell cards that are capable of 600x, which is 90MB/s. And that's megabytes per second.

Lexar, Sandisk, Kingston, and so on.

But let's say price is more important.  A $11 card gets you a 4gb and at around 20MB/s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208339

Only the best of the best 2.5" mobile hard drives can even sustain 90MB/s.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,53.html

And let's talk about access times: top scoring western digital 2.5 drive is 14.5 ms.  Compact flash: about .25ms.  (66 times faster)

All of this doesn't matter much, because the real limitation is the amiga hard drive controller(and the various parts that make up the I/O subsystem).  That's the bottleneck.  Even the cheapest of the hard drives or cards will be fast enough.

I recently switched from hard drive to compact flash and I LOVE IT.  So much better.

The only concern w/ compact flash is that you do have a maximum number of writes per location, which is about 1 million.  On a modern OS like Windows, this is probably not enough but on amigaos, it should be ok.

[Franko]

@ kamiga

It's not quite as simple as what specs the manufacturer states for compact flash cards...

It down the both the hardware and software that you have to use on the Amiga that makes reading & especially writing to CF's slower compared to a real HD...

If price is really important to you then look at it this way for £30 (or much less) you can have yourself a 200Gb HD, now how many 4Gb CF cards at $11 would you need to buy to achieve that (if you could use them that is)...

Here's the answer $511 to equal the same storage space as a real HD that costs you less than £30 ($65) and which just so happens to be faster than CF drives...

Run some real tests on an Amiga comparing read and write times between a CF drive and a real hard drive, think you'll be surprised by the results...