Some months ago, I purchased some IDE to SD adaptors from ebay.
Three of them to be exact. 2 for my A1200's and 1 for my A600.
They were super cheap and I considered they might not work, but I had lots of spare SD cards and thought what the hell.
After battling in WinUAE to set up the SD cards with PFS3, and finally getting it right after multiple attempts, they work like a charm. Both A1200's are now equiped with 32GB drives.
One of the A1200's has an EIDE interface, the other doesn't. Both have Blizzard 1230 MkIV's.
One of them is a regular A1200 in it's case, the other is an A1200 mobo, built into a desktop atx style media case.
The A1200 in it's regular case, had issues with the HDD light staying on all the time.
I need to investigate further with the custom A1200, but I think the EIDE solves the problem, but I need to double check that.
After a lot of searching I found other people with this problem, but didn't see a solution anywhere.
Although I could have missed it, I did search a fair bit for a solution and then came up with my own.
The problem is one of a voltage mismatch basically.
The A1200 is a 5v device, while the IDE to SD card adaptor is 3.3v or 3.5v device.
The A1200's LED light comes on, when the Activity signal is pulled low. For the Amiga, this is around about 3.8-3.7v if I recall correctly.
The second you plug in the IDE to SD adaptor, it pulls the activity signal down to 3.5v and the light comes on.
To remedy this, I seperated the wire from the IDE ribbon cable, for pin 39, and stripped it a little so I could get a multimeter on it. I first tested the voltage and when the machine was idle, it was around 3.5v as I suspected.
So I cut the wire for pin 39 and added a resistor in-line. I started with 10k, this made a difference, LED was now dimmer and activity more noticable. Being short on higher values to test with, I put 2 x 10k in series, to get 20k and that solved the problem. :-)
The A1200's LED now flashes normally with activity and goes out when it should.
It is fair to say that somewhere between 10k and 20k there is a better value, but 20k worked a treat for me.
I have been using it for some months with this mod, and no issues at all.
Hopefully this is of use to someone!
Usual disclaimers apply about doing at your own risk!
If anyone believes, what I have suggested here is dodgy, please feel free to speak your mind.
I'm not a technician and open to my logic being corrected.
