SSD for A1200

[Mrs Beanbag]

I'm thinking of investing in a solid state drive for my Amiga.  Its 1.2Gb drive is getting on a bit now, it's all backed up on my PC but I have nightmares about it failing.

Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware?

Also what would be the best/easiest way to reinstall all my things on a new drive?  I gather there are programs for Linux that will write Amiga partition tables and file systems.  My Amiga does have a network card.

[mfilos]

Easiest way to initialize a hardware drive is:
- Either your Amiga or...
- Mounting the new HD on your PC via WinUAE and initializing from there.

If you have a backup copy there, you can restore it easily from there as well, and then transfer the HD on your real Amiga.

If you don't have a backup, it's just fine but it also needs 2 more steps:

1. Mount your current HD to WinUAE, and take a backup of your partitions by using:

Code: [Select]

1> dh0:
1> lha a -aezrx windh_c:dh0_backup.lha #?
That will create an lha archive named dh0_backup.lha of the partition DH0: inside your PC's C: drive (be sure to enable "Add PC drives at Startup" in Hard Drives tab)
You can repeat the same procedure for all your other partitions

2. Mount your new HD to WinUAE, initialize it and format it (if it's not already) and then:

Code: [Select]

1> dh0:
1> lha x windh_c:dh0_backup.lha
That will restore everything the backup has (from your PC's C: drive) into your newly setup DH0: partition (be sure to enable "Add PC drives at Startup" in Hard Drives tab again).
Repeat for all the other partitions and you're set

[Thomas]

A real SSD would be a big waste of money IMHO. A CF-IDE adapter and a CF card with 20x speed (ca. 3 MB/s) is sufficient. Every faster device would be slowed down by the Amiga's IDE port.

To copy the data, you should connect both drives to the same computer. I would recommend WinUAE for the job, but you didn't mention Windows.

[Mrs Beanbag]

A real SSD would be a big waste of money IMHO. A CF-IDE adapter and a CF card with 20x speed (ca. 3 MB/s) is sufficient. Every faster device would be slowed down by the Amiga's IDE port.

To copy the data, you should connect both drives to the same computer. I would recommend WinUAE for the job, but you didn't mention Windows.

I was looking at this one:
http://www.xstra.eu/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=844&category_id=265&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=3&lang=en

that's a fairly small waste of money if you ask me but a CF card could have its advantages.

I don't run Windows, I run Linux and I don't have UAE installed at the moment (I do all my Amiga stuff on real Amigas).  It might be simplest just to make a boot disk with HD tools and AmiTCP on it.

[Thomas]

that's a fairly small waste of money

Well, http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00300110A plus http://www.amazon.de/dp/B000VY7HYM will give you four times the space for half the money.

[tone007]

CF really is the way to go.

I've had the best luck with SanDisk CF cards in the 4GB range, and they just give the adapters away on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Small-CF-Compact-Flash-Card-2-5-IDE-44-Pins-Male-Adapter-Converter-/190598540670?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c608eed7e

[Duce]

A true SSD, 2.5" IDE or SATA (via adapter) form factor would likely be a complete waste of money for an A1200.  You're still going to be fighting the slow native IDE interface of the machine.  

Benefits of a CF solution are the fact you can simply pop new CF cards into the machine to boot different configs, and along with that use said CF cards with an inexpensive add-on USB card reader on a commodity machine using UAE to set them up.  The internal 2.5" drive you'd have to remove each time, where as a CF card you can just pop out if the mod is done right.  CF solution is a hell of a lot cheaper, to boot.

I have SSD's in all my machines, using RevoDrive's in my PC's lately.  Got a 32 GB Patriot SATA SSD in my SAM 440 machine that works extremely well, but then again it's native SATA onboard.  Machine boots from cold to ready to use in a matter of seconds, was really a stunning difference when I put a SSD in it.

Depending on your views on SSD tech and the accompanying OS's, many people dislike using SSD's on any machine that does not support TRIM - which AFAIK, the Amiga does not.

[Thorham]

Forget about SSDs, they don't last very long: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

[Duce]

TRIM hopes to combat the issues of SSD's regarding longevity.  Early SSD's were junk as far as I am concerned, but have come a long ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

[runequester]

Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate

[x303]

Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate

Well even 4GB is not so much nowadays. My 1200 has a 16GB drive, but even that one is pretty full now.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Another vote for the humble CF cards. Nowadays 4 gigs is plenty for most amigas, and they're quiet and fast, rather than having the entire machine vibrate

There's no way I'm ever going to get close to using 1 Gb let alone 4, so "four times the capacity" isn't really a selling point.  Quiet and fast, that I like the sound of.  I'm mainly just conscious that my existing HD isn't going to last forever.  An industrial grade SSD has its appeal, to me, over a compact flash card which isn't really intended to be used this way.  The money isn't that much of a problem (heck I can drink that much money in an evening).  The thing I care about most is reliability.

TRIM only needs to come in after you write to the drive a lot.  I don't imagine that is ever going to be a factor, either, and even when it does come in it's only to restore it back to original speed.  I don't know about this but I suspect the reliability issues with PCs are caused by the high throughput the devices have to endure from modern operating systems.

[Khephren]

Never had a problem with CF in ide or the PCMCIA. Used both for years now with the same two cards. Sandisk appear to be the best, and the faster CF's do seem to give more throughput, for some reason. Good thread here on eab:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=47708

[x303]

There's no way I'm ever going to get close to using 1 Gb let alone 4, so "four times the capacity" isn't really a selling point.

Well getting a 1GB CF card is getting harder and harder, especially a sandisk. So maybe 2 or 4GB will do fine too.

[Cammy]

Whenever I back up an Amiga so I can put a new drive in it, I make an uncompressed LHA file of the entire drive contents and copy it to a SD card with a PCMCIA card reader. Then I prepare and format the new drive in the Amiga using a floppy disk I have prepared with PFS3, HDInstTools, Fat95, CompactFlash.device, LHA and some other bits. After the partitions are formatted, I simply extract the LHA back onto the fresh partition.

I'm not sure why people make things more complicated by swapping drives around and using Windows and UAE, perhaps it's because they don't have a floppy disk handy.

I have been using CF cards in my CD32, A1200 and A600 for years and I swear by them. I have also seen people with solid state drives in their Amiga and they're happy with them too. I suppose you buy what you can afford. I recently finally swapped my 2GB CF for a 8GB one because I was constantly shuffling things around on my drive as it was 99-100% full all the time. I never thought I'd need so much space but eventually I did fill it up. There are a lot of games, software, and media to put on there. I like having 8GB now because I can store several of my favourite musical pieces in high quality 8SVX format, so I can listen to a long playlist of music and it's not CPU-intensive like MP3s.