stan@amiga.UUCP (Stanley Shepard) (03/25/86)
I just received the Micro-Forge hard disk drive, and the following are
my comments/observations.
The system arrived as four distinct parts:
(1) The hard disk drive box.
(2) The Amiga interface box.
(3) The power supply box.
(4) Floppy disk and instructions
(1) The power supply box is big and bulky, and the cables seem short. A
power switch on the side should always be left in the off position.
It seems the power supply is switched on and off from the Amiga power
switch by sensing voltage at the Amiga interface box.
(2) The Amiga interface box, connects to the side connector of the Amiga and
has a ribbon cable to the hard disk box. Inside the box are two small
PC boards that plugged into each other. The Amiga side connector is not
extended. The plastic box that surrounds this is a snap together type.
My box was missing a hole for the power cable (I easily drilled one), and
half the box never fit well (I still only use half).
(3) The hard disk box (which I presume also houses the controller) is metal.
It looks nice (my opinion) with the only draw back being 4 protruding
screws (heads only) (two on each side).
(4) The system also came with a floppy disk for installing the drivers etc.
into the system, and a users manual (about 7 pages very simple).
After following the instructions and hooking up the disk I powered it up.
My Amiga powered itself on, even though the switch was off. After finding
out, by guessing, that the power switch on the power supply should be left
off, I powered up my Amiga; kickstarted it; and inserted the disk that came
with the Micro-Forge system. I followed the instructions on formatting the
disk and the "installed" the hard disk. I copied a few things over to the
hard disk, changed the startup file as suggested by the instructions and
re-booted. By George, it came up and worked!! I copied much more over to
the hard disk, and then decided to run a few tests.
First I tried opening a window containing about 20 icons. I was impressed.
Although it seemed to take about 10 seconds, it also seemed very fast. No
longer was floppy disk going err-err-err-err as the icons appeared, just
a few flashes of the hard disk light and the window is done.
I next tried compiling mandelbrot, since I already had figures for various
times spent compiling that. The following are those results:
AMIGA COMPILATION TIMES
(all times in minutes:seconds)
-------------Amiga------------
Vanilla Smarter Smart With HD
Program 512k 512k 1024k Micro-F
mand.c 10:31 3:45 2:32 2:35
mand1.c 9:09 3:02 1:52 1:54
mand2.c 2:36 2:09 1:00 1:05
mand3.c 9:11 3:22 2:04 2:11
mand4.c 5:34 2:34 1:21 1:24
link 3:30 3:30 1:50 1:58
----- ----- ----- -----
40:31 18:22 10:39 11:07
Definition of environments:
===========================
Vanilla 512k:
This is the recommended environment using the supplied command
(execute) files. It is very simple to understand, requires
the minimum amount of RAM and is very slow.
Smarter 512k:
This environment is VERY similar to the vanilla environment.
The performance improvement is based on moving source and
object files, temporarily, to RAM disk. Note that even
though this involves 2 extra copies and 2 extra deletes it
still takes less than 1/2 the time. This does reduce the
amount of memory available to compile in and therefore may
not be able to compile some very large programs.
The link portion was not changed.
The differences are:
copy <file>.c to RAM:
compile RAM:<file> (instead of compiling <file>)
copy RAM:<file>.o to DF1: (save the output file)
delete RAM:<file>.c RAM:<file>.o
Smart 1024k:
Run everything out of RAM: Note that this requires some setup
time as the world must be copied into RAM: prior to starting the
compiles.
With HD Micro-Forge:
Same commands given as with Smarter Amiga. Speeds approximate
those of "Smart (1024k) Amiga. Set up time (takes longer to boot)
aprox 20 sec.
As can be seen, the improvement is quite substantial. Overall, I am very
pleased with the product. The few drawbacks (lack of technical documentation,
and unintegrated appraoch of expansion) are easily overlooked when a product
performs as well and reliably as this one has. I hope that other vendors
do as well on Amiga add-on products as Micro Forge has.
The following is address and telephone information for Micro-Forge.
Micro Forge
4771 Cool Springs Rd.
Winston, Ga 30187
(404) 949-5698
Disclaimer: These may or may not be the opinions of my employer.