honp9@menudo.uh.edu (Jason L. Tibbitts III) (05/24/91)
The AdIDE is an intermal hard drive interface designed to connect Amiga
500's, 1000's and 2000's to IDE type hard drives. The interface is a
fine performer, but both hardware and software problems hindered the
installation procedure.
[Moderator's note: yet again, the reviewer left out the summary. The
above are my own words. I'm doing this in the interests of expediency,
but please help me by thoroughly reading the guidelines. Thanks! JLT3]
This review is of the AdIDE hard drive interface from
ICD inc. 1220 Rock St., Rockford, IL 61101.
Phone (815)968-2228.
This interface allows the Amiga 500, 1000, or 2000 owner to connect
up to two autobooting IDE drives to their computer. It comes in two
models, the AdIDE44 for the 2.5 inch drives that go inside the 500
and the AdIDE40 for the 3.5 inch drives. The support software is
buggy and some commands are irrelevant since the software is for the
AdSCSI interface as well. If you are lucky enough to get it set up
it is a very nice package, but getting there can be an adventure.
First, a little info on IDE. IDE is very similar to SCSI, both have the
controller embedded right on the hard drive. Both accept simple
commands from the computer and do all the overhead themselves, making
them much faster than the old XT type hard drives. The IDE concept
was developed with the PC-AT in mind so only two IDE drives can be
connected together (unlike SCSI). Unfortunately, IDE has no official
ANSI specifications which has led to more than 24 slightly different
variations of the drives.
The AdIDE interface is a small 1" by 3" board that plugs into the 68000
socket on your computer (sorry A2500 owners). Then the CPU plugs on
top of the interface. This rules out most accelerator boards that
also plug in this way simply because there is no more room under the
keyboard. Depending on which model you buy, it has a connector for
a 44 pin cable (for the 2.5 inch drives) or a 40 pin cable (for
bigger drives). It has another connector for an optional drive access
LED and a jumper for selecting the autobooting option. The AdIDE44
interface is sold bundled with a 2.5 inch 20meg drive ready to go
inside a 500. The AdIDE40 can also go in a 500 but comes with no drive
since it is really made for the 1000 or 2000. If you use the 40 pin unit
with a 500 the drive will have to be mounted externally and you will need
to supply power for the drive as well. ICD supplies the software drivers
you need along with a formatted program for setting up partitions on the
drive.
I chose the AdIDE40 for use with my 500 because I had access to
several cheap 3.5 inch IDE drives. I had some trouble convincing some
mail order houses that the AdIDE40 would work just fine, but finally
got on the waiting list to get one.
When it arrived I immediately tossed the manual away (oops) I mean I
carefully read through the manual and saw that it was confusing because
it kept referring to the AdSCSI board, with only an occasional mention
of IDE. I plugged everything in and flipped the power on... nothing.
I spent the next half hour cleaning, bending, then straightening the
pins trying to get them to make good contact. The socket for the CPU
on the interface is "less than adequate" to say the least. Finally
it sprang to life! Now on to the software.
I booted with the disk supplied by ICD and loaded the formatter
program. Once again I spotted trouble when everything seemed to
evolve around the SCSI interface and not the IDE. There are options
that have no bearing to an IDE drive, like FORMAT for instance.
You never low-level format an IDE drive, most drives simply ignore
the request, or change it into something like VERIFY. The manual
says nothing about this.
What is supposed to happen when the formatter software is run is that
the interface is "polled" to see what is connected to it and a window
opens with the device number and name of the drives. Well, the 80meg
drive I was using was not ready to divulge that information, and came
up with a blank in the window where its name should have been. The
formatter program looks in an ASCII table to find a match to the
drive name it gets from the interface and reads the drive parameters
from that table.
Well if the drive returns no name, of course there is no match in the
table! This is a poor way to get drive information since not all
drives will return a name when asked (no standard,
remember?). ICD has one failsafe, if the program cannot match the name it
gets from the interface with one in the table it asks you for the
IBM bios number of the drive. Unfortunately, there is no bios number
that matches an 80meg drive either. So I tried a 40meg drive with the
same results, no name. IT did , however, have an entry in the IBM
bios table so using that I managed to get it working. I partitioned
it and copied a bunch of files to it while I waited for Monday to call
the tech support at ICD. The tech support team was less than enthusiastic
to help me over the phone. They suggested I send the whole thing back
along with the drive so they could test it. (some support?)
After 15 days I got it back and was surprised to find that they had
replaced the ROM in my hard drive (for free!). I called them and they
confirmed that the code in the original ROM was not set up to comply with
what the interface expected. They had also formatted the drive for me and
installed Workbench. I hooked it back up to my 500, again fighting with
the loose socket problem for a half hour, and it worked like a charm.
In summary, I am still very happy with the AdIDE interface it is
fast, small, and quiet. If you do not mind tinkering with things, I would
suggest the AdIDE40 for all systems, because you can get 3.5 inch drives
with more capacity cheaper than 2.5 inch ones. On the other hand, you
run the risk of having to get a new ROM for your drive, or not having
your drive work at all. If you want a hard drive on your 500 and have no
desk space or do not like tinkering, the bundle is still a good deal.
But be warned 20meg fills quickly!
Here are the speed comparisons as reported by
DiskSpeed 3.1 - Copyright (c)1989,90 by MKSoft Development
Device DH0:
AdIDE with Conner CP342 40meg drive
Test Intensity medium Performance stress: NONE
23 files create
33 files open/close
96 files scan
28 files delete
193 files seek/read
Device DH0:
AdIDE with Quantum 80AT
Test Intensity medium Performance Stress: NONE
17 files create
40 files open/close
123 files scan
17 files delete
77 files seek/read
The Quantum really out performs the Conner when you add buffers
because the Quantum as a built-in disk cache that stacks the data.
DMA contention cuts the performance about in half.
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