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Amiga Hard Drives
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It's easy enough to connect a HD to your Amiga when you know how. However, there are
a few things you should know and a few bits of advice it's worth having. At the very
least, this guide should hopefully save you a little bit of time and maybe some
headaches.
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Size Matters
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The size of HD you get is important. But how do you know exactly how big a drive
is? Even though the adverts tell you it's a 4GB drive when you format it you only
get 3.7Mb of space. So what's up?
Manufacturers and retails have a little scam going on the size of hard drives.
Normally, a gigabyte is defined as 1024@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1024@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1024,
or 2^30. However, HD manufacturers decided that they would define a gigabyte as
1000@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1000@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1000. So, in the example above
your 4GB drive would actually be
1000@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1000@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;1000@nbsp;@times;@nbsp;4. In normal
computer terms where 2^30 is a gigabyte, that's only 3.72GB.
However, even after you have formatted the drive there will be some space taken up
by the file system for the drive, so in the above example you would probably get about
3.6GB of files on the drive.
It's also important to realise that drives over 4GB can cause problems unless you
are careful with a few things. There are two main problems: the filesystem and the
device you use. In the former case all you have to do is make sure your filesystem
is up to date (easy, see next section). Checking that your device supports it is
a tad trickier, but as a general guide most modern hardware does. Anything that is
NSD or TD64 compliant is usually okay. The CyberSCSI and BlizzardSCSI, the DKB SCSI
cards, 4-way buffered interfaces for IDE and Elbox Flyers (also known as Power
Flyers) are all okay. The internal A1200 and A4000 IDE is too, however without
a patch it is limited to drives of up to 8GB. You can get the patch on Aminet,
but make sure you try it before you get a big drive as it doesn't work on all
machines. Really, if you have the basic IDE on an A1200 or A4000 you might as
well get a 4-way interface and IDE Fix.
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Filesystems
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When installing a HD you have to decide what filesystem you want to go for. The default
choice for most people is the Fast File System, or FFS. It comes with most Amiga's and
is known to be fairly reliable. However, it's not the fastest system in the world and
isn't really suited that well to large hard drive partitions (over about 2GB). Remeber
also to make sure you have the latest version of the file system. If you have OS3.9 or
3.5 you will have it, otherwise get it from Aminet and use the patches available to
make it as up to date as possible (these can be found on the
Amiga Inc web site. Also be sure to check Aminet for some tools such as ReOrg
and DiskSalv.
A good (and free) alternative to FFS is the Smart File System (SFS). I personally
run SFS and have had no problems with it so far, although be aware that it is still
technically beta software. The main advantages of SFS are that it supports any size
HD (up to several terrabytes!), it's fast and it's very resiliant. SFS is what's
called an @quot;atomic@quot; filesystem, which basically means that even if you
get a power cut while saving to the drive you data won't be damaged. It seems to work
well. You also get a recycled directory on every drive that holds the last 20 or so
files you deleted, just in case you want them back. SFS also supports long file names,
up to the limit of 107 for AmigaOS in fact. I find this particularly handly.
There are lots of tools for
SFS on Aminet too, but be sure to get the latest version of SFS available here:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hjohn/. As of writing
this (10/01/01) the latest version os 1.84.
A commercial alternative is to use PFS3. This is a very similar system to SFS, and
there is really very little to choose between them other than the cost (PFS3 is around
�30 IIRC). Another alternative is to use CrossDOS, however this isn't recommended.
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Preping Software
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After you have decided what filesystem you want, you need to decide on the software
you want to use. As a general rule do not mix hard drive preping software. It's just
asking for trouble, so choose one and stick with it.
The obvious choice is HDToolBox, the software that ships with AmigaOS. It's a reasonable
bit of kit, and in fact the latest version that ships with AmigaOS 3.9 and 3.5 is
quite good. However, there are some limitations in what it can do, in particular it
seems not to like very big drives (at least, it's not happy with my 40GB drive).
My personal choice is HDInstTools, which ships as part of IDE Fix and can be found
for free on Aminet. This software gives you more power to control exactly what you
want than HDToolBox does, but it's also harder to use. It does however support
even the biggest drives and seems to work well.
Other choices include FaaastPrep, the GVP software that comes with most of their
hardware, and SCSITools which ships with Phase 5 hardware. I would choose HDInstTools
over either of these, however it's really down to personal preference which you
want to use. Try a couple out without saving anything to your drive and see which
works best for you.
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PNG Datatype
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This site uses PNG format images. If you can't see them, you probably need
the PNG datatype which can be found
on Aminet.
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