UC.BRI%DEEP-THOUGHT@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Brian Totty) (05/02/86)
What about access times for the St Hard Drive? The transfer speed is fine, but what about track to track speeds and such? In any case, is there a firm release date yet? I want one. --- Bri Brian Totty 450 Memorial Drive Room D113 Cambridge, MA 02139 uc.bri@deep-thought.mit.edu ...!eddie!bri -------
sandra@utah-cs.UUCP (Sandra J Loosemore) (08/23/86)
Well, I finally broke down and got an Atari hard disk for my ST. The good news is that it's fast and has lots of room. Programs that take 20-30 seconds to load from a floppy load in a second or two from the hard disk, so there's no more sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to read the files. The bad news is that the disk is very noisy. I didn't notice it so much when playing with the demo machine at my dealer's, perhaps because there was more background noise there. It's loud enough to be bothersome, though, so I'm going to experiment with some acoustic shielding for it. It's not possible to just move the disk farther away because the cable is very short, and using a longer cable is not recommended. Here are a few other details on the disk. First of all, if you don't have TOS in ROM, forget about using the hard disk. You cannot boot from the hard disk either -- you need to load the device driver from a floppy. The hard disk is divided up into "partitions" or "logical disks". You can have up to four of them, and you can configure their sizes. However, once you've configured the partitions, you can't reconfigure them without erasing the disk. The hard disk driver seems to be hard-wired into using disks C, D, E, etc. I haven't been able to get the hard disk to coexist with the Intersect ramdisk because of this. If you need more than 20 MB, you can connect up to 8 hard disks up to your ST at the same time. But there are limits on the total number of directories you can have, and the number of files that can appear in each directory. The manual has a whole page full of warnings about the various restrictions. -Sandra Loosemore sandra@utah-cs.arpa
bobd@dadla.UUCP (Bob Davies) (09/26/86)
Does anyone know what type of interface Atari or Supra uses to
convert the DMA port to a SCSI bus for their hard disk?
I am particularly interested in what specific ICs are used in the
interface as I am in the process of connecting a Micropolis drive (fast!)
to the Atari ST. Any information is helpful and appreciated.
Robert Davies
Tektronix Logic Analyzer Division
tektronix!dadla!bobdmoore@NCSC.ARPA (Moore) (10/09/86)
A distant friend of mine recently purchased the 20M Atari hard disk. New to the microcomputer world, he was told that he needed to run the head park routine every night. Is this on the level? I told him it seemed to me that he should run it if he was going to be moving the system, but otherwise not. Also, a local dealer said VIP, PC/Intercomm, and some printer program (I for- get the name) would not run on the hard disk (??!!??). Was the dealer referring to copy protection? Surely the individual programs couldn't care less where they are stored and loaded from. As usual, verbose comments are encouraged, though all are appreciated... Jim Moore NCSC (except I'm at home now)
turner@imagen.UUCP (D'arc Angel) (10/09/86)
> > A distant friend of mine recently purchased the 20M Atari hard disk. New to what is a distant friend??? > the microcomputer world, he was told that he needed to run the head park > routine every night. Is this on the level? I told him it seemed to me that > he should run it if he was going to be moving the system, but otherwise not. > i think that falls into the same catagory as turning off the power strip when you're done in addition to turning off the ST, namely it could hurt any ... > Also, a local dealer said VIP, PC/Intercomm, and some printer program (I for- > get the name) would not run on the hard disk (??!!??). Was the dealer > referring to copy protection? Surely the individual programs couldn't care > less where they are stored and loaded from. > i heard that there were problems with VIP amoungst others on a hard disk but i believe most of the problems were solved by having the program and any associated files in the top level directory because the program was too stupid to look in the current directory, rather it assumed that it was the only thing on the disk > As usual, verbose comments are encouraged, though all are appreciated... > as usual these are only wild (explicative deleted) guesses on my part > > Jim Moore > NCSC (except I'm at home now) I'm on first myself... -- ---- These are days for the locust to eat - Winston Churchill Name: James M. Turner Mail: Imagen Corp. 2650 San Tomas Expressway, P.O. Box 58101 Santa Clara, CA 95052-8101 AT&T: (408) 986-9400 UUCP: ...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!imagen!turner CompuServe: 76327,1575 GEnie : D-ARCANGEL