Dave@daami.vnet.van-bc.UUCP (Dave Allen) (12/15/87)
WEDGE Update! - December 12, 1987 AMERICAN VERSION (by indirect request) [...All the regular warnings about this message possibly being construed as a commercial and not appropriate for some UseNet Beings] Prelude ******* Thanks to all those who have tried to send me E-mail about the WEDGE and the Hard Drive systems for AMIGA owners. I have just discovered that my UseNet address was incorrect and although some mail had come through other channels, there were many people wanting to ask questions and place orders. My UseNet address, as in my signature, is dave@daami.van-bc.UUCP. Mail should get to me now. Description *********** The WEDGE is a two piece interface that connects to the BUS connector on an A1000 or A500. The first piece is a vertical board approx. 6" long and 2.5" high with the BUS connector approximatley in the middle. The second piece is a backplane that sits horizontal under the first board and has two female connectors. The first connector holds the wedge and the second holds the "controller" card, such as the Western Digital WX1 or the DTC5150. These two cards are tested and recommended. The WEDGE allows you to connect up to 2 142 Megabyte IBM style hard drives. Requires Drive Controller card - suggested Western Digital WX1 or DTC5150. Here is a physical description from Bill Henning: ---------------------+ /WEDGE | / two ribbon cables === | L I<-- WA1 / HHHHHHHHH | I I / +-------------+ === | I I==========| | | I I | | ===================#=|=I I==========| | <-- winnie + power supply | I I | | in a box ---------------------+ | | | | ^ || U U | | | || ------ +-------------+ Amiga 1000 ^ +-- small backplane " The wedge is plugged into the computer and a small XT-style backplane, which also holds the hard disk controller. The hard disk ribbons go to the winnie in whatever box is used, which also holds the power supply for the drive. The wedge and controller can be powered from the Amiga or the drive's supply. I am currently using an XT-compatible [read cheap] fliptop case with a 150W power supply, which powers the wedge and controller and winnie." - B. Henning Note 1: Winnie = Winchester Disk Drive Note 2: The WEDGE does not come with an enclosure. In order that we could keep the costs down and to leave room for future expansions we will only provide an enclosure if there are enough people requesting them. Of the present 15 wedge owners only one has requested the box. Restrictions as of December 10th, 1987 ************ At present the WEDGE may not work with the internal memory expansion called the "Insider" from Michigan Software. Measures are presently being taken to accomodate problems created by this board. More in the next update. The A500 version of the WEDGE will be available in January. The cost will be approx. $20 US more in view of more parts and labour going into these units. SOFTWARE ******** There is a disk of software included which will allow you to format hard drives, mount DHx:, use the WEDGE, and Park it with very little trouble. There will be upgrades to these files available for the cost of the disk and mailing. COST **** Please Note * Shipping and handling are extra * ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The cost of shipping and handling for the WEDGE and Software ONLY is $18.00 US to most places in the US. In Canada the cost is $10.00 CDN. I will ship the WEDGE to places in the US from Blaine, Washington to avoid the $35.00 brokerage fee. Shipping and handling of complete systems and individual components will vary depending where you are. Please leave me a message before sending your money so that I can estimate these charges. Special for Amiga User Group Members ^^^^^^^ Please note, I have set up a discounted pricing schedule for Users Group members to encourage Amiga owners to become involved with thier local group. Prices are in AMERICAN DOLLARS. Sorry No credit cards. -- The A1000 WEDGE with Software; $145.00 US Funds User Group Price $159.00 US Funds non-user group price -- Package Number 1 20 Megabyte Half Height Hard Drive - MiniScribe 3638 (5.25") or 8438 (3.5"), Western Digital Controller - WX1 or DTC5150 - will control up to 2 Hard drives A1000 WEDGE (as above), Half Height Case with Power supply. - will hold 2 Half Height Drives - Nicely fits under an A1000 and has a switched - 4 output power conector. 650.00 US User Group Price 670.00 US Non User Group Price -- Package Number 2 40 Megabyte Half Height Hard Drive - MiniScribe 3638 (5.25") Western Digital Controller - WX1 or DTC5150 - will control up to 2 Hard drives A1000 WEDGE (as above), Half Height Case with Power supply. - will hold 2 Half Height Drives - Nicely fits under an A1000 and has a switched - 4 output power conector. 809.00 US User Group Price 829.00 US Non User Group Price -- Individual Components -- 20 Meg (3438 or 8438) without controller ------ 320.00 US User Group Price 339.00 US Non User Group Price ---------------------- 20 Meg (3438p) with controller ------ 389.00 US User Group Price 406.00 US Non User Group Price ------------------------ 40 Meg (3650) without controller ------ 415.00 US User Group Price 434.00 US Non User Group Price -- 40 Meg (3650) with controller ------ 474.00 US User Group Price 493.00 US Non User Group Price -- HalfHeight AT style Power Supply and Box (as above in Packages) 130.00 US User Group Price 147.00 US Non User Group Price -- WX1 or DTC5150 Controller 87.00 US User Group Price 95.00 US Non User Group Price -- Technical Information ********************* Please note. I am not a technical person and there may be mistakes in the wording or decription. I have taken information from the Technical people working on this project and have attempted to make it as readable as possible. Because we have had so many questions in the last month and I have had trouble sending mail to many of you I will attempt to answer questions in point form for clarity. Many thanks to Bill Henning, Larry Phillips and Jim Brooks for assisting me in getting this information together. 1. Can the WEDGE be used with a Hard Card (or self contained controller and Hard Drive)? YES but you must provide power to the WEDGE and Controller/Drive unit from an External source. Information on wiring in the additional poer is available on request. 2. How much power does the WEDGE require? The WEDGE uses .50 mA and the standard WX1 controller requires 750 mA totaling 800 mA. To run the WEDGE from an external supply requires 3 wires with +12v, +5v and GND. 3. Can you fully describe the WEDGE? The WEDGE is a small printed circuit board that plugs into the 86 pin expanion socket on the side of an Amiga 500 or an Amiga 1000. It does not auto-configure, and must be MOUNT-ed. Into the WEDGE plugs a small backplane which has one empty PC/XT style slot, to be used for a standard PC hard disk controller. In the future a backplane with more than one empty slot will allow more than one PC hard disk controller to be plugged in, and more hard drives to be on-line with the proper drivers. 4. I would presume it is a slap on the side something or other that allows you to use IBM hard drive controllers so that one can use an inexpensive IBM hard drive. Is this what it is ? That is entirely correct. The current driver software works with the Western Digital WX1 controller and the DTC5150 and should work with some other controllers, if they are fully compatible to the WX1 [i.e. same registers, same DRQ handling, etc]. Some other controllers have been tried - and Jim [the guy who designed the hardware and did the initial driver] is trying to get more cards to work. 5. Does it pass the buss properly ? (IE: can I use my 2 meg slap on the side expansion ?) The WEDGE does not pass the bus due to the possibility of overloading the bus and possible timing problems. However, if your memory expansion board passes the bus, the WEDGE may be able to work plugged into it. If your memory board passes the bus it should work. The Comspec 2 Meg board and the Microbotics Starboard II have been tested and work fine. Some external memory boards require more power and may require the WEDGE to take its power from the external supply. Wiring information for this option is available on request. Please indicate which memory expansion you have and we will have it tested. 6. Is the source for the Drivers available? Can it be tweaked to run faster? The WEDGE comes with the proper driver but NOT the source. As far as tweaking it to go faster, Bill Henning is working on that. He has already managed to increase the speed by about 30% over the original figures. 7. How does one of the hard drive systems described in the previous article compare speed-wise for program loading/saving/etc. to the other hard drives available ? A program to test the speed is DiskPerf. Currently, with the latest speed-ups at an interleave of three the driver is reading at about 34k/sec and writing at about 22k/sec, about 60 directory entries/sec The bottleneck at this point seems to be the Amiga's file-system - the reason I say that with fair confidence is that the latest driver implements pre-fetching and a small cache [small yes, but with a 65% cache hit ratio with only 16 buffers!] and Jim has put a scope on the disk controller, and AmigaDOS is spending about 60ms between accessing the disk [as most requests are satisfied from the prefetched and/or cached data]. The much-rumoured new file-system should speed up the drive considerably. As for the ranking, as I recall the Pal-Jr. DMA drive was faster for reading by about 6k or so [If I recall, it clocks in about 40k or so per sec], but the WEDGE+WX1 controller was faster than most non-DMA drives that appeared in that Amazing Computing article. I am still trying to squeeze more performance out of the driver. 8. Does anybody out there have one that can give a review ? Bill Henning says " I have a prototype of it [far more primitive than the finished product - but it works!] and I have been quite satisfied with it. I have had it running for over two months without any problems, and Jim has been extremely helpful in getting my hand-wired prototype to work [and he was very kind in letting me build a prototype of his design, and trouble-shooting some wiring mistakes of mine]. It works - what can I say? My startup-sequence used to take about four minutes to crunch through, but now it finishes in about 40 seconds. My machine is far more usefull now - I do not waste a megabyte as a ram disk. It is not as fast as a DMA drive, but it is by far the cheapest method of getting a hard disk for the Amiga. When the new file-system shows up [I hope soon!] the throughput should greatly increase [I recall reading rumours on comp.sys.amiga claiming 3x-5x improvement in speed with the new file-system - but I have no way to verify such claims :-( ] The WEDGE + WX1 + hard drive is currently about 3x the speed of the floppy [but much less trashing due to the pre-fetching & caching] but the perceived speed increase is greater. I can double-click on VT100 (thanks DBW!) and it is up & running in less than two seconds [about 1.5s]. Incidentally - 10Mb is too small a drive for an Amiga [but 10Mb is a heck of a lot better than 0Mb!]." There are many more people using the WEDGE now and if reqested I will post a message with the "testimonials". 9. Will the WEDGE work with a Western Digital WX2 controller? Yes, but it will be limited to 20 Megabyte drives only as it will not access drives which are larger. 10. Can you provide a demonstration unit for our users group? Yes, but I come with it. Cost of accomodation and return Air Fare in advance and I'll be there. :-) 11. Can I use a National Computer Limited NDC5127-50 Controller? We have a driver for this controller but it is 2.5 times slower than the WX1 and is not recommended for that reason. 12. Are there any discounts for Developers or Users Groups? The discounts mentioned are for users groups only. There are no other discounts (unless you are buying 20 at a time :-) 13. If I order a Package can I slap it on and use it right away? Yes. I am preformatting the drive packages when I send them out and setting up the software to work on bootup. 14. Can I easily ad a second drive of a different size? Yes. You should indicate which drive you will be adding when you order. The second drive will not require additional hardware outside of the cables to run both drives. 15. Is the WX1 a sasi/scsi controller? NO. 16. What are the shipping and brokerage costs for a complete system to the US? It seems it depends on who you talk to at US customs. You should set something up with a call to a Broker in your area and describe the system that you will be getting. With the exception of the WEDGE alone, we are not resposible for duties or tariffs imposed on the other side of the border. 17. Can you supply expansion boxes with 240V/50Hz? Not really. I would suggest you contact a local IBM or Clone dealer about an expansion box that will meet your requirements. 18. Will the WEDGE work with commonly available RLL controllers? Yes, we have used the Western Digital RLL controller and it works fine. Again if you going to use this please let us know when ordering. I am not selling RLL systems yet as I have had too many conflicting reports about RLL reliability. Ordering Information: Cash or Money Order ONLY Made payable to Reiter Software Inc. c/o 9651 Alexandra Road, Richmond, B.C. Canada, V6X 1C6 -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Dave Allen - President of PANORAMA - Pacific Northwest Amiga Association + + - "I can't stop Multitasking" - Write: 9651 Alexandra Rd. + + // Richmond, B.C. Canada V6X 1C6 + + // or: Dave Allen UUCP: dave@daami.van-bc.UUCP + + \\// or: {ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!daami!dave + +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) (12/17/87)
[ "Ah, Mr. Anchovy...." ]
Is anyone else besides me getting tired of these WEDGE ads?
Thank you for your efforts, Mr. Allen, but personally, I'm going to
wait for the SDP (so hurry up, Perry!).
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape ihnp4!ptsfa -\
\_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac
O----^o The Only Way To Fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack")
"Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctorrichard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (12/19/87)
Some guy in a green cape writes: >[ "Ah, Mr. Anchovy...." ] I said NO ANCHOVIES. > > Is anyone else besides me getting tired of these WEDGE ads? Yes and no. I appreciate the progress reports, but they are a bit long. Perhaps if a quick summary and a "Email for more details" would be in order. >Leo L. Schwab -- "Well they say, that Santa Fe, is more, than 90 miles away" {ihnp4!crash, hplabs!hp-sdd!crash}!gryphon!richard || richard@gryphon.CTS.COM