jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) (07/24/90)
Well, I finally unbent and bought Lattice C 5.05 for my 500 in hopes of getting some use out of it while waiting for the 3000's prices to drop a bit. I have 2.5Mb and 2 floppy drives, but am still going batty. Since Lattice likes to have both drives (for Disk 1 and 2 unless almost all of disk 1 is resident), I've been putting my sources in RAM: and compiling them there. So far so good. Then I get to some of Matt Dillon's more useful stuff, like dnet, which requires at least his make and some of his libraries, and I hit a wall. There's no more room on either disk for more stuff and I've already dumped all the balast I could to get things like mg, dmouse, and other indispensible tools on the first disk. What to do? I'm not gonna sit there swapping disks like a fool, even assuming that I can get the assigns right, and 2.5 MB of memory only goes so far. So it starts to look the the little 500 is going to need Even More investment before it's really useable. Foo. So, I look in the magazines.. Hmmm. DM1200 for a 33 Meg drive?? Yeeearg! And that's one of the CHEAP ones! Well, there appears to be a SCSI controller made by Supra for only DM498 and I can get my hands on SCSI drives in the 70MB - 150MB range very easily. We toss them out of unix boxes all the time (let's face it, 70MB may be a lot for an amiga, but it makes little more than a decent swap space on a unix box these days). So, the question remains as to whether this controller is: a) Fast? b) Flexible? [does it deal with all drives obeying the SCSI CCS, or just ones with EXTENDED R/W?]. c) Autobooting? d) Have space for additional RAM expansion? e) The best/most usable controller for the money? The other alternative seems to be something called the AMIGANET Ethernet board for around DM1000. This one is a real can-o-worms. What will the Amiga do over this ethernet card (what sort of software is provided?) Will it do Real NFS? Reasonably transparently? I've got multiple megabytes of free space on the unix box sitting across the room and it has NFS and a thick-wire ethernet interface (though I also have a thick-to-thin converter lying in a box somewhere, if needed). If I can get the Amiga to Really Use this card properly, it's a far better solution than buying a hard drive. It gives me access to the unix box's tape drive, for one, and lets me go straight to the comp.sources.amiga software I've downloaded. If I could also fake Lattice's hd_install script into thinking it was installing itself on a hard disk (well, it would be, just not the Amiga's hard disk!) I would be in seventh heaven. Please, please, please, does anyone out there have experience with one or both of these strategies? I wouldn't expect the former to deal with just any weird disk, but it'd be nice to know if I could use it with an Emulex ST506 -> SCSI controller (the Emulex speaks a somewhat primitive dialect of SCSI) as well, since I have several 70MB ST506 drives gathering dust on my desk. As for the latter, I certainly don't expect a full SUN NFS implementation or anything, but I'd be happy if there was some way to get the Unix box (your average SYSV box with Berkeley sockets) to provided a transparent ETH: (or whatever) device to the Amiga that looked like a hard disk, or maybe a really big floppy :-). Whether this is through NFS or a custom server program [for which source is provided!], I don't really care. If there's general interest, I will post a condensed summary of replies. Jordan -- PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany UUCP: pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com EUNET: unido!pcsbst!jkh ARPA: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com
stevem@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM (Steve McClure) (07/24/90)
In article <JKH.90Jul23192821@meepmeep.pcs.com> jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: [ stuff about needing disk space on A500 deleted ] >So, I look in the magazines.. Hmmm. DM1200 for a 33 Meg drive?? Yeeearg! >And that's one of the CHEAP ones! Well, there appears to be a SCSI controller >made by Supra for only DM498 and I can get my hands on SCSI drives in >the 70MB - 150MB range very easily. We toss them out of unix boxes all the >time (let's face it, 70MB may be a lot for an amiga, but it makes little more >than a decent swap space on a unix box these days). So, the question >remains as to whether this controller is: a) Fast? b) Flexible? [does it >deal with all drives obeying the SCSI CCS, or just ones with EXTENDED R/W?]. >c) Autobooting? d) Have space for additional RAM expansion? e) The best/most >usable controller for the money? > [ stuff about something called AmigaNet deleted ] I used the Supra SCSI host adapter for the 500. I was very pleased with the price and performance. I used several embedded SCSI disks as well as an Adaptec 4000A SCSI<->ST506 translator with several ST506 drives. There was also room for a 2M RAM expansion board, last I heard it went for about $300 US for the ram and $200 US for the host adapter. The formatting and partitioning software was easy to use and nicely polished. You shouldn't have any problems using a CCS drive with this host adapter. It also supports the SCSIdirect protocol and RDB structure. This should make the drive portable to other host adapters and provide a way to use tape, cd-rom ... , with the host adapter. I was very happy with my A500 setup. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve email: Steve.McClure@Columbia.NCR.COM 803-791-7054 The above are my opinions, which NCR doesn't really care about anyway! CAUSER's Amiga BBS! | 803-796-3127 | 8pm-8am 8n1 | 300/1200/2400