Well, aren't you just a old fart! HAHA joking here. I understand what you mean, My a4000 runs 24/7 and when i went to ssd i couldn't sleep due to lack of hd noise..Go figure. But as time went on fan noise and loud 15K hd's started to bug me and i worked making stuff quieter. I still like hd and floppy noise and some machines still use conventional hd's.
Going to scsi card readers and flash cards has some big benifeits:
They are silent(why we have indicator light these days instead of hd noise lol).
they use almost no power, milliamps in most cases.Easy on old psu's.
take up 1/4 the space sometimes(well scsi card reader is 3.5" form factor)
they have near instant access time(CF's) unlike hd's..it makes it feel snappier.
they generally dont fail often. I am still using some sandisk cards from 15+ years ago.
the sandisk extreme have a lifetime warranty also.
i converted my a590 side car to scsi card reader, the gvp turbo530 with acard +cf, and the alfadata ram+ide to CF.
i keep a load of old scsi hd's,floppys,cdroms etc. never know when i need one,great for testing. many of my machines still have cd burners/drives.
As for backups, there is no excuse to not backup amigas these days,its so easy now.
I keep backups on many machines as well as cf's and hd's. i have many old backups on cd's that still work.
never cared for zips, Iomega drives had a good rep for failures
I did use syquest carts for many years in the early days without troubles.
This thread began discussing backing up and I thought I would just comment. I still run all conventional hard drives both IDE and SCSI. I have always kept full copies of my computers Workbench on a ZIP disk. I have them all. Generally I have Workbench on a second Volume or disk and if there is an issue I just format the dodgy partition and simply copy back my current version of the Workbench. I also have my Amigas networked to PCs and have for some considerable time kept full copies of archives of my Amiga hard drives on PC disks and burnt to CDs. All of which can be seen and read by my Amigas.
I still await the dreaded day when my hard drives fail, but hasn't happened yet. I still have XT drives on 590s running.
The truth is I very rarely ever need to reinstall anything. I dunno, it just keeps working. Amiga files being so small it takes no time to get all of the Workbench onto a USb stick or Passport. The trick is the networking cus once you have an 'out' doesn't matter how slow the mule is they always turn up in an emergency.
Maybe one day I'll use these new fangled flash card thingys. Or not. Probably not. I have like a cupboard full of hard drives and a drawer full of 2.5" drives. I like the sound of a hard drive, I can sense the machine is alive when I hear the disk activity. I can read a lot into whats happening on a machine by the sounds they make. Just doesn't feel right, camera memory in a computer. The one A2000 I have gives out a wonderful trill noise from the hard drive when she boots. The A1200 has always made a reset kinda churn just after boot and the Viper gives out a single barely audable ding as it settles in for the day.
Just my thoughts.
