oakley@cgou01.dec.com (mooz mooz) (11/21/87)
As a result of the posting of a message by Dave Allen of the Panarama Club in Vancouver B.C. Canada about the 'Wedge' interface into the ST-506 disk world, I took the plunge and ordered the Wedge, Western Digital WX1 controller and a Disk Case. Thanks to the efforts of Dave Allen et all I received the package a couple of days ago. I quickly unpacked and put together the pieces with my pre-owned Segate ST-412 (made for Digital Equipment as an RD51) 10Mb full height winnie. Everything went quite smoothly on the whole, the only problem I have discovered is that the RD51 disk requires a very high degree of power which is pushing the supply near to the limit, which on occasion has caused a loss of speed on the drive and a subsequent hang of the system . But, I have been assured by several sources that the typical half-height drives require far less power and the supply in the Disk Case can handle two disk units comfortably. To continue, I used the supplied FMT file to perform the low level format of the drive and then AmigaDos to FORMAT to a DOS disk, followed by the normal Mount DH0: and presto there was 10Mb available to fill. So I immediately began to transfer every full 3 1/2" disk to the wide open spaces. Everything went very smooth except when the disk decided that it had a bad block everything would hang until C-A-A. After the reboot and mount the first time I accessed the HD the volume validation went into action and all was well. The file which was being copied showed a size of zero bytes so I renamed the file to bad.block and continued to fill the disk to 75% without incident. Without any experimentation in the values supplied to FMT I would guess that the time required from unpack to completion of Dos formatting would be about 30-45 min. (longer for larger disks - the two formatting runs are quite long). All in all very satisfactory and easy to do - even if you don't know what's what. The only potential drawback at this time is that the Wedge/WX1 combination that attaches to the buss is uncovered. But in discussing this with the board's designer I learned that this is not a permanent problem since they just didn't want to delay release of the product any longer and that some ideas they are kicking around for a box/case sound very interesting (no committments of course - just great potential), so I'm perfectly willing to use it as is for the next little while. The Disk Case is very clean and incorporated a master switch for the case with 4 switched outlets on the back for those other pieces as well as a fan. It's physical dimensions are slightly smaller than the A1000 which means that it fits well with the A1000. As for the driver, I have been told that the software developers are working on a bad block replacement scheme for the driver which will provide for block replacement when bad blocks are discovered (sounds like a nifty idea for the Amiga), but until then I am perfectly satisfied with just keeping some bad.block files around to map out the bad blocks. On the whole I believe that this offering by Dave Allen and others is really worthwhile in that you can obtain a 20Mb hard disk system for about $900.00CDN (approx $670.00US) which can support 2 drives of varying sizes available from a highly competitive marketplace, which means cheaper. So while I am one of the converted, I must say that I am very pleased so far (after 3 days) and can recommend this to somebody considering a hard drive system and doesn't want to spend a lot of money. Besides, it's designed, written, sold and used by Ami people just like us. wayne oakley (I paid for it so the opinions are mine.)