[comp.sys.amiga] Hard Drive Advice

mjm@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Michael Murphy) (10/07/88)

I've been trying to follow threads of discussions about what kind of hard
drives/controllers to get for a 1000, but i still have incomplete
information at best.  Would some of you with experience mind e-mailing me
your opinions/recommendations/warnings?  I really would like to get a hard
drive system soon, and am unsure about the best way to go about it within a
$900 budget (this basically rules out getting an expansion chassis with
slots that would accomodate B2000 Bridgecards and other cool stuff, which
would be about $900 to begin with).  I understand from what i've gathered so
far that autobooting under 1.3 is impossible given my above restriction, as
is true DMA, but i must compromise.  I would still like to hear a bit about
those, though.  I basically would like about 50-65MB (ST157N?), and access
time of at most 40ms.  Prices and availability would be greatly appreciated,
too.  Thanks...

-Michael

rap@rap.ardent.com (Rob Peck) (04/29/89)

There have been lots of postings from folks who, after installing
their hard drives, have had various problems with them until someone
here or elsewhere finally gave them that critical piece of information
that they needed.  I'd like very much to put a compilation of such
Amiga-Hard-Drive pearls of wisdom, i.e. what information the manufacturer
often leaves out of the install procedure, or makes extremely difficult
to locate, or just something that, if the user only knew about, he'd
actually be ABLE to understand what the rest of the install document
was all about.

I did capture the hard-drive-blues story in the intro posting to
comp.sys.amiga.tech (from KJohn, I believe), and that certainly
is useful information.  If anyone would like to volunteer other
information, I'd be very grateful.  I have about another week
before I simply HAVE to turn in a few useful paragraphs about
this topic for the second edition of the Amiga Companion.  I'd
be pleased to acknowledge any useful contributions to the topic...
see your name in print :-) :-)

I figure by helping new users this way, it could sell more
Amigas, right?  And thats good for all of us.

Rob Peck

limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) (04/30/89)

In article <6112@ardent.UUCP> rap@rap.ardent.com (Rob Peck) writes:

> I did capture the hard-drive-blues story in the intro posting to
> comp.sys.amiga.tech (from KJohn, I believe), and that certainly
> is useful information.  If anyone would like to volunteer other
> information, I'd be very grateful.  I have about another week
> before I simply HAVE to turn in a few useful paragraphs about
> this topic for the second edition of the Amiga Companion.  I'd
> be pleased to acknowledge any useful contributions to the topic...
> see your name in print :-) :-)

I was wondering if anyone out there has written a program that
computes near-optimal mount lists?

I.E.  A program that I can say, "I want a ~10 meg partition, a
partition exactly 880K, and the rest" or "I want a 2 ~twenty meg
partitions and two 880K partitions" etc and get the proper mount lists
with minimum wasted blocks?

If I had TK!Solver on my IBM I could do it.  If I had a decent
spreadsheet on my Amiga I could figure it out.  I know the problem is
NP-Complete and the "about 10 meg" capability could really make for
some interesting permutations but a mathematician should be able to
work something out, right?

Offer: I can program.  I understand the problem enough to explain it
to a mathematician.  Can you do this kind of math?  How would you like
to get on a fish disk and become famous?  Mail to me and maybe we can
write a utility that will help out a lot of people.

Tom
-- 
 Tom Limoncelli -- tlimonce@drunivac.Bitnet -- limonce@pilot.njin.net
       Drew University -- Box 1060, Madison, NJ -- 201-408-5389
   Standard Disclaimer: I am not the mouth-piece of Drew University

thywiss@csvax.cs.ukans.edu (John A. Thywissen) (05/01/89)

SCSI Hard drive problem:
  Drive will not operate (not even power up on some drives), and
  **Drive activity light does not track controller's light**.
   ^^^^^^ This is the giveaway.

Possible Cause:
  SCSI cable UPSIDE-DOWN or cable cabled backwards.

Note:
  Manufacturers have a helova time debugging this.

--John Thywissen
-------
John A. Thywissen                 <thywiss@csvax.cs.ukans.edu>
1122 West Campus Rd.  Rm. 213     Senior, University of Kansas 
Lawrence, KS  66045-8081              Dept. of Computer Science
(913) 864 2646                    Amiga Developer/Guru