AKISUJAR@NUSVM.BITNET ("S. Sujarittanonta") (03/04/90)
RE: Cheap way to hook SyQuest to 1040ST
I am using SyQuest HD now with my TUBO16/MEGA4 but the haed disk I have is not
TOAD File but an ATARI MEGAFILE 44. Yes It is available in Singapore and not
that expensive too. Comparing to the bare SyQuest 44 drive which selling at
S$1450 with 1 cartridge I bought my Megafile 44 and 1 44 Cartridge for S$1800
(US$1.00 = to S$1.85). It comes with extra LCD, Power supply plug and 50 pin-
SCSI as well as bracket for installing another 3.5" hard disk inside the case.
I will put my CONNER 100MB drive (I paid S$1200 for this one)into it. Drive is
very well made (I open up the drive to have a close look at the heads and voice
coil which make funny noise during startup but not as loud as the Seagate 277R
-1 in my Megafile 60. It look durable enough and the head is park into a plas-
tic prong to prevent any movement during transporting the drive. The top cover
of the drive is fixed with only 2 small screws. ICD HDRATEd is 28ms similar to
MEGAFILE 60. Drive is much cooler than Seagate therefore I deciced to put 15OHM
3W resistor to lower the fan speed/noise down. Unhook it from Atari SCSI>DMA
card and connect it direct to my Mac Plus with home made cable(per instruction
in Spectre GCR Manual) then format a cartridge with CMS HD utility version 5.3
or 5.5.3 The cartridge will be recognized by Spectre and even boot up with the
System/Finder written with Mac Plus. Macintosh will not read the cartridge if
it is formatted under Spectre. With PC-Ditto (Disk version) I can not boot the
PC-DOS from partition C:. PC-DITTO normally doesnot boot DOS if the HD is set
to AUTOBOOT with ICD HD Util or Atari AHDI. Although I could get my MegaFile 60
to boot PC-DOS from C: partition with Supra HD Autoboot, Supra Autoboot does
not help in the case of Syquest 44 Drive. I will experiment further with MS-DOS
4.01 when I receive my SuperCharger from Beta System Computers AG. hopefully by
next week. (Beta System supply MS-DOS 4.01 with their Supercharger and insisted
that I should use it to get the full performance). I am now using PC-DOS 3.2 as
I found it to be more stable under PC-DITTO than PC-DOS 3.3 or MS-DOS 3.30B.
I will report my finding to the net in due course. BTW SyQuest 44 MB Cartridge
is selling at S$190 here. S. Sujarittanonta, School of Architecture,
National University of Singapore.