fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) (12/31/86)
Shortly before Christmas I acquired (at long last) a hard disk for my
Amiga. I ran across a good deal on a CLtd 20M SCSI system, that was
available and scarfed it up. Thought I would let you all know some
details...
HARDWARE
--------
The CLtd system comes in two pieces. The first is a general purpose
SCSI controller that snaps onto the expansion connector on the side
of the Amiga, and passes the bus. The case is 11" deep by 5" high
by 1" wide, and contains a PC card which is only 2 1/2" by 7", containing
the following components:
o AM5380DC (SCSI chip?)
o 74LS374
o 74F521
o 74LS32
o 74LS00
o 74LS74
13 Resistors
2 Caps
CPN 2222A
3 Sips (resistor paks? at bus)
That's it. Not a lot in there. The board and component quality appears
good, but the enclosing metal box and ribbon cable connection between
the two boxes is about "prototype" quality. My understanding is that
CLtd wanted to get them out before Christmas and will be upgrading the
mechanical quality soon.
The second box is an off-the-shelf Rodime S-20+ hard disk box. The
label on the back says "S-20+ Rodime Ser #F00005898". Inside the box
is a power supply (marked NP5020B CMKS-115X Made in Sigapore) and a
3 1/2" 20M hard disk with built in SCSI controller (marked Rodime R0652
Type 0A). The two boxes are connected by about 3 ft of ribbon cable.
PERFORMANCE
-----------
Subjective performance, compared to floppies, is great. Using
Workbench (tolerable now), icons come up significantly faster. Compiles
and such also run much faster. However, performance as measured by
Rick Spanbauer's disk benchmark is not exactly blazing. Read speed is
not quite twice as fast as a floppy and write speed is not quite three
times as fast as a floppy. For full details, see my mini-review of
the ASDG Minirack in another posting.
OTHER
-----
Yet, despite the lack of blazing speed increases, I am quite happy with
the box. To me, having 20M of immediately available storage space is
more important than speed. For that, I can load stuff into my 4Mb
of ASDG ram...
I also like the idea of having a proven SCSI controller (since it
works with an off the shelf, independently manufactured SCSI drive),
since I now have a fair amount of confidence that I can replace it
with a larger drive, or daisy chain additional drives, and expect it
to work properly. And, since the only Amiga specific part is the
relatively cheap SCSI controller box, if I jump ship to some other
system (like the new MacIntosh in 87), or acquire a Zorro SCSI card
for use in an expansion box, I can reuse the drive.
Oh yes, I paid $900 for mine...
DISCLAIMER
----------
Neither I nor my employer have any financial interest in ASDG.
-Fred
--
===========================================================================
Fred Fish Motorola Computer Division, 3013 S 52nd St, Tempe, Az 85282 USA
{seismo!noao!mcdsun,hplabs!well}!fnf (602) 438-5976
===========================================================================page@ulowell.UUCP (Bob Page) (01/01/87)
OK, so Fred beat me to the review of the CLtd 20MB hard disk. I pretty much concur with his findings, and especially the summary: the performance ain't GREAT, but the ability to have 20MB on line (and increased relative performance over stiffies) is GREAT. Fred said that he paid $900 for his. I paid $750 (that's with the pass- thru connector for the aMEGA 1MB box). However, he also said he had no connection with ASDG ... I assume you meant CLtd? Did you also make a typo about the cost? My justification was that $750 is half as much as some of the other drives out there now. I would like to see higher performance, but will wait for future products (that use Amiga's DMA chip perhaps?) before I buy another SCSI controller. Three more comments: 1. I find the drive somewhat noisy. Not as bad as the Tecmar T-Disk is/was, but compared with the Amiga (which is VERY quiet), it is a little too noisy. If I turn my stereo on normal (for college graduates :-)) volume, it masks the noise OK. Maybe with 2 feet (Fred said 3 feet with his) of cable I can move it under the table or something. 2. The physical box is rather large! I thought with that packaging (I had not looked inside) they were using a 5-1/4'' drive or something. It's 9-3/4'' wide by 10-1/2'' deep (the Amiga A1010 stiffy drive is 6 by 8). It is not the same color as the Amiga (doesn't anybody read the Amiga Schematics?), but then, it is in a metal box, so I guess it may be tough to match the paint. It is close, though. Am I being picky? 3. The documentation that came with the drive is pitiful. Just one photocopied sheet that said ``move these three files your your internal stiffy and type BindDrivers''. I had to also move the Mountlist file. There's no documentation on how to tweak the drive. It WAS easy to set up, however. Alas, our (Fred's, mine) units are first-run, the next batches may get better (remember the jumper for the 1MB RAM board?). To sum, these are small negative points. I am happy with the product. I would not be for $1500, but then again, I only paid half that. When Perry comes out with a DMA SCSI controller :-) I'll just buy that and plug my existing drive into it. I think it's a good buy, and recommend it for people with large storage needs or people who despise changing stiffies. Speed demons should look into a 2-4MB recoverable RAM disk, or possibly Ethernet/NFS. ..Bob PS It's nice to say 'avail' and see ``DH0 .. 20M''! -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. ulowell!page, page@ulowell.CSNET
fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) (01/03/87)
In article <899@ulowell.UUCP> page@ulowell.UUCP (Bob Page) writes: >Fred said that he paid $900 for his. I paid $750 (that's with the pass- >thru connector for the aMEGA 1MB box). However, he also said he had no >connection with ASDG ... I assume you meant CLtd? Did you also make a >typo about the cost? Ooops. The ASDG part was copied from my preceding mini-review of the ASDG product and I forgot to change the name. The $900 was not a typo. Got mine from HT Electronics in Sunnyvale. Where did you get yours for $750? By the way, I just spent the last 3 days recovering from a scrambled disk. This could have happened on ANY hard disk, so it's not really a CLtd comment. Was running a program that had several files open on the hard disk and was actively writing to it when it GURU'd. Bye bye disk structure. I did find out that diskdoctor does NOT fix, or even necessarily find, all filesystem problems. It ran for a while, grumbled about some things it found, asked if it was ok to delete some corrupted files, and then exited with the suggestion to copy my files to another disk and reformat this one. Well, apparently something it does as it is exiting causes the disk validator to run, which was failing with some message about Key xxx already set. I spent most of new-years day writing my own version of a filesystem consistency checker, with emphasis on the consistency of the keys. It ran fine on floppies or on ASDG's recoverable ram disk, but I couldn't get it to run on the hard disk. Does anyone know what a return of -3 from DoIO() means? Anyway, luckily I had just done a full backup of my disk with bru about 4 days before, and the rest of the files that were newer than my backup, except for one, were all readable, so I was able to reformat the drive and recover, with the loss of only a single file. Bru (Backup and Restore Utility) is a program I wrote for my Unix system about 4 years ago, after taking one look at tar, cpio, volcopy, dump/restore, etc and saying "yuk!". I did a quick port to the Amiga about mid-December. The Alpha 1 version of bru is freely redistributable and will appear on one of my next disks. It is also available on the Software distillery and on BBS-HT (HT Electronics' BBS). It is the last freely redistributable version as I intend to eventually make it a commercial product. So, the question is, have you backed up your hard disk today??? -Fred -- =========================================================================== Fred Fish Motorola Computer Division, 3013 S 52nd St, Tempe, Az 85282 USA {seismo!noao!mcdsun,hplabs!well}!fnf (602) 438-5976 ===========================================================================
bangia@utcs.UUCP (01/05/87)
Fred, you described a couple of problems facing hard drive users
in your last message. Being an owner of a 20 Meg, I have faced similiar
problems and Thought I'd throw my 2 cents worth in.
First of all, I'd like to see some disk Performance Tests run on the various
Hard drives. Just to get an Idea of the speed to cost ratio.
The problem you Faced with KEY XXX already set is easily fixable from
DISKED. It involves very little work. Basically, enter Disked, type
G XXX ; where XXX is the KEY that was already set!
i ; find out information about KEY...
G PPP ; where PPP is the hash chain link group (I think, it's one of the
; ##'s displayed by the I command.
hfilename ; where filename is printed from the I command above (hash command)
zzz/0 ; where ZZZ is the number printed from the hash command
; and the 0 effecttively deletes this file so the validater will
; will never see this key. (also, this will WILL BE LOST!!!)
k
x
;correct the checksum and set write protect mode off
p
;save the block back to disk!
q ; leave the program
;;
This procedure does have it's draw backs, THE FILE WILL BE effectively DELETED.
Does anybody have a Better Solution??
Also, While I on the line,
WHAT THE HECK DOES KICKSTART, and the WORKBENCH Loader do???
Exactly !! Basically, I want to write my own Kickstart and Workbench Loader
That access another device (mainly the Hard drive!).
Exactly what sectors does kickstart and workbench take from the disk nad where
should the Boot strap program put these sectors ???
- Naresh Bangia (bangia@utcs)
- normal disclaimer (but then again, I'm paying for this anyway!)
--
--
N. Bangia
UUCP: {decvax,seismo!mnetor,utzoo}!utcs!bangia
ARPA: ??????dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (01/06/87)
>Also, While I on the line, >WHAT THE HECK DOES KICKSTART, and the WORKBENCH Loader do??? >Exactly !! Basically, I want to write my own Kickstart and Workbench Loader >That access another device (mainly the Hard drive!). >Exactly what sectors does kickstart and workbench take from the disk nad where >should the Boot strap program put these sectors ??? I'm no expert, but here is a little information: The kickstart loader resides in ROM (as in the real thing). As far as a know, it's a simple bootstrap which loads the first 256K off the kickstart disk into the WCS, then executes it. I assume that the OS will then ask for the workbench et all. Thus, unless you plan on modifying the boot rom, all you can theoretically do is modify data in the OS image on the kickstart. I can see a person being able to hack up the disk id check (KICKBENCH), and perhaps making the OS look for the workbench on DF1: instead of DF0: (any takers??). I don't think you will be able to hack in making the initial workbench search go to the hard drive. As far as the rest of the workbench goes, all you really have to do is reassign all the logical assignments. -Matt
fnf@mcdsun.UUCP (Fred Fish) (01/06/87)
In article <899@ulowell.UUCP> page@ulowell.UUCP (Bob Page) writes: >2. The physical box is rather large! I thought with that packaging >(I had not looked inside) they were using a 5-1/4'' drive or something. >It's 9-3/4'' wide by 10-1/2'' deep (the Amiga A1010 stiffy drive is >6 by 8). It is not the same color as the Amiga (doesn't anybody >read the Amiga Schematics?), but then, it is in a metal box, so I guess >it may be tough to match the paint. It is close, though. Am I being >picky? Oh yeah, forgot to comment on this. Happens to be the same as a Mac footprint. I you check carefully in the latest MacWorld (and what am I doing reading MacWorld you might ask :-), you'll see one keeping the poor little Macs toes warm. Don't remember the page number. (50% rule defeater...) (50% rule defeater...) (50% rule defeater...) (50% rule defeater...) -- =========================================================================== Fred Fish Motorola Computer Division, 3013 S 52nd St, Tempe, Az 85282 USA {seismo!noao!mcdsun,hplabs!well}!fnf (602) 438-5976 ===========================================================================