Xorg@cup.portal.com (Peter Ted Szymonik) (04/07/89)
Hi Matthias, We have a lot to study <grin>. First off, there are many hard drive manufacturers for the ST line. In the 'Big Three' are the Atari MegaFile series and that great line of drives by ICD of Illinois and Supra of Oregon. But a good number of other companies also sell ready made hard drives for the ST, among them are Toad Computers of Maryland and ABCO of Florida. One compnay that I have never heard of is Vortex! [Is this a European company by any chance?] If you stick to drives made by the Big Three you should have no problems in terms of stability and reliability. Prices vary wildly depending on where you buy so the best I'll offer are the phone numbers of the companies I know and from there you can ask about prices and compare mail order vs. dealer. ICD, Inc. 1-(815)-968-2228 ICD makes the popular FaST series of drives. These are cases the fit perfectly under the monitor (a footprint slightly smaller than the computer case) and they can hold two 3.5 drives or one 5.25 drive. ICD's host adapter is also one of the best made for the ST and allows a cable up to six feet (!) in length due to their excellent shielding and adaptor design. ICD is committed to the ST market and they just released a tape back up unit for the ST which backs up at an incredible rate of 6-8 megs a MINUTE! This tape backup is also housed in a FaST style case and it even has room for one 3.5 drive. Supra Corp., 1-(800)-727-8772 Supra makes a whole line of ST drives from 20-160 megs housed in shoebox style cases. Supra is an excellent company with great tech support but the drawback is that they recently been giving the ST market a cold shoulder and favoring Amiga development instead. Supra also makes the FD-10, this is a 5.25 floppy back up unit which can store an amazing 10MEGS per floppy disk. But this is also in a shoebox case so there is no room for expansion (as with all current Supra drives.) Toad Computer Services, 1-(301)-544-6943 Toad Computers offers both hard drive kits and assembled drives. If you want to build your own drive, Toad offers the ICD FaST case with power supply, fan, ICD host Adaptor and *everything* else needed to put together a hard drive minus the mech itself! I went this route and it took me a half hour with a screwdriver to have my HD up and running! They are also very knowledgable. ABCO, See any copy of ST-REPORT for the number ABCO is a company owned by Ralph Marino of ST-REPORT fame. H puts together custom hard drives and offers a six-month warranty. MicroTyme Inc., 1-(800)-255-5835 If you go the mail order route then there is no better company to order from. MicroTyme is THE BEST ST mail order firm in the United States. Back to your questions... Atari software does not allow for more than four partitions (I think this is still correct) but both ICD and Supra's software allows up to 14 partitions to be created. Also, a limitation in TOS requires that each partitions be at least 0.6megs and at most 16megs. This militation has been corrected in the newest version of TOS (1.4) which allows partitions up to 32 megs. I believe that ICD's software requires an ICD host adaptor where as both the Atari and Supra software can be used on any drive. Do the drives make noise? Well, *all* drives make noise, and how noisy your drive will be depends on a lot of factors including shielding (quality) of the cables, grounding of the drive, the drive mech itself, fan noise, etc. I have heard noisy and dead quiet drives from all the major drive makers. How fast are the trasnfer rates, again, this depends entirely on the drive mech and which host adaptor you use. As a benchmark, my Supra 30meg drive transfered 350Kps at 60-65ms, the 100meg ICD drive I just put together flies at 550Kps and 35-40ms, it all depends on the drive mech supplied with your drive (or the one you buy.) Is there caching? Yes, there are lots of PD and commercial cacheing programs, but I haven't found them to be at all necessary given the ST's blazing HD data transfer rates. Probably the only thing left to speed drive access with be the new TOS 1.4 which will improve FAT handling. Anymore questions? Just ask! Peter Szymonik Xorg@cup.portal.com