Hard drives for an A2000?

[KapitanKlystron]

 I have an A2000 I almost never use as it has a very small hard drive (52mb). It has a GVP 030 accelerator and kickstart 2.04.

I have been thinking of getting a 1gb SCSI drive for it. It should work with any narrow SCSI (50 pin) drive, shouldn't it? Will 2.04 work with a drive that size and how tricky is it to format and partition a drive that size?

My sosn and I had similar systems.. My son's was exactly the same and mine was a GVP 040 Combo w/GURU ROM.

My system seemed to run all size hard drives with no problems.  I was even running an UW SCSI 9G drive with a connection converter.

OTOH, on my son's system we were unable to get it to recognize any drive larger than 1G.  I tried 1.5G, 2G, & 4G drives.  His box even had 3.1 ROMs in it.  The only thing it did not have in it that might have made a difference was the GURU ROM.

My recommendation, would be to stay at 1G or smaller drives.

  Steve

I have been fooling around with a Buddah card (ide card for the zorroII/III slots) and with os3.1 it sees a 60 gig ide drive just fine.  I am in the process of putting a bootable sector on the drive and dumping the scsi drives because of age.  This should work and might work for you as well.  80% sure... but it might be worth checking out.  Software hut sells them.

Spud

[amigau]

you can use larger drives, SCSI or IDE, with the A2000, the key is twofold:

1) keep partition size at 2GB or less - even with the TD64 patch, partition size has to be <2GB, an AmigaDOS limitation

2) use the TD64 patch (FFS 44.1) to allow drives larger than 4GB overall to be used.

Good luck at finding a new drive at under 40GB, though.   IDE would be by far cheapest over SCSI.

I recently put a 40GB IDE drive in my A2000 w/ a buddha and it works fine - I didn't bother to create partitions on the entire drive, just created 4 at just under 2GB each - I can always make more on the unused capacity as needed later, after all.

a good article on this topic would also be:

http://www.youngmonkey.ca/nose/articles/NewTekniques_9810/AmigaInMotion.html

kevin orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com

[Castellen]

Another suggestion for when using big disks (over 4Gb) is to use the
PFS3 disk filing system.
It supports disks up to 3Tb in size, is much faster than other
filesystems I've tried, virtually bullet proof and it has heaps of
nice features.

It's a commercial product, but is still available.
If you don't want to spend much, chuck a wanted add on
www.amibench.org

[KapitanKlystron]

I would like to thank everyone for their help and advice. I would have to find an IDE controller to go that route. I guess I will have think about that a little more. It would be nice to get some use out of that  2000 again. :-D

[Kronos]

My advice for "big" HDs:

Always keep atleast one "install" partition safely under 2gb as a
lot of install-script will fail on you if you point them to a greater one.

Just install it there, move the directory and edit user-startup.

Not nice, but the only way I got a lot of SW on this 80gb Seagate.

[QuikSanz]

My 2000 came with the GVP 030 40Mhz combo card & a 240Mb quantum hd
ran out of room soon, got a Seagate 1Gb Hd, pluged it in, reformatted it "was M$DOS" loaded.. worked great
Then came MP3's "DOH" now have 18Gb baracuda, lots to spare.
I keep Sys partition @ 200Mb, plenty of room for goodies.
the rest are spread out equil more or less.
BTW the 18Gb drive is with an 060 GVP card. see profile

Chris
 

[QuikSanz]

Oh BTW that card should be scsi2, an adaptor should work for a diferrent connection type.
PFS3 is supposed to be good but can't make it work on this setup. I use the 1Gb for backup
but I still have 240Mb HD around if you want you pay post. Inside US, Easy.


Chris