dlou@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou) (05/01/91)
Well, I asked about MAST and their Starblazer board, and that turned out to be rather discouraging, so it's now time to solicit alternatives. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the Fastrack by Xetec or the Starboard ][ by Microbotics. I need a board or a combination of boards that will give me more RAM and a hard drive controller for my A1000. The Starboard is a memory board that has a SCSI daughterboard option. The Fastrack seems to be a SCSI board that has a FastRAM connector on it. Can anyone recommend any other boards that will give me SCSI and RAM for my A1000? -- Dennis Lou || "But Yossarian, what if everyone thought that way?" dlou@ucsd.edu || "Then I'd be crazy to think any other way!" [backbone]!ucsd!dlou |+==================================================== dlou@ucsd.BITNET |Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went to my high school.
bpv9073@sjfc.UUCP (Brett VanSprewenburg) (05/04/91)
In article <18878@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> dlou@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou) writes: > >Well, I asked about MAST and their Starblazer board, and that turned >out to be rather discouraging, so it's now time to solicit >alternatives. > >I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the Fastrack by >Xetec or the Starboard ][ by Microbotics. I have the Xetec system on my A500. Initially I had some problems with odd system lock ups and funny RAM errors, but with the help of Xetec's great tech support and 1 year warranty, I have a fully working system now. I have a Q40 ProDrive and 4 meg of 100ns SIMMS installed on the RAM board. I have found no system incompatibilies so far. I have a 1 meg activated Agnus chip, an ICD 520 internal board with 2 meg fully populated and the 1 meg chip RAM mod obviously :-). It's a nice, quick system with the harddrive out of the way. This was important to me as having my hard- drive subsystem right next to my bashing fingers on the keyboard, not to mention zealous friends and family around, was not something I wanted. I went to an computer electronics repair shop, bought a full height metal case with 60 watt power supply, power & room for 2 BIG drives in it for $20. Old Mountain disk case, says 10 meg IBM on the bottom, looks outdated, but it's tough. The Xetec drive cable is a standard one and sports about 6 feet of travel. The case on the side is all metal also, quality and support is _excellent_. I bought the SCSI controller for ~$170 and the FastRam board (plugs into internal 86 pin connector) for ~$70. Unpopulated. Everything you need (except drive) is included. I suggest (strongly) getting a Quantum. I had a Conner CP3040a from a MAC IIsi and couldn't get it to work. The Quantum fires right up. Another important aspect of buying a controller is the included prep software. A friend of mine is kinda jealous of the way the Xetec software works and he's got an A3000 with HDtoolbox from CBM! Included is a back-up program, a 'park' program, 2 ways to prep your drive (complex or simple), a make quick boot program for those with 1.2 kickstart, and a great PD program called SafeReboot. Remaps Shift-Amiga-Amiga series of keys to FLUSH the SCSI disk caches before rebooting the machine. I've never been caught by the corrupt bitmap yet, seems to work! There is other included stuff, but it escapes me at present. There's all kinds of programmer stuff on the disk for using their drivers, even source code for some things with examples. Anyway, this is a lot longer than I wanted it to be. On MAST, I have an Enhanced Unidrive from them (bought before the price went up $30) with minimal problems. ==Brett