Another great episode. My IDE storage story....I started out with the original 2.5 inch IDE hard drive in my SX32 equipped CD32. I swapped that for a IDE to 4gig CF card but soon outgrew the space and switched to IDE to SD adapters. I use them in my CD32's with equipped with TF330's. I get it all setup as I like on winuae, back it up to a file, and clone that to the SD card in a simple USB reader on my windows machine. If I need to I can just re-clone the backed-up image to another SD card but so far I have been running the SD cards for over a year and have not had any issues.
@@10MARC I've not tested with benchmark tools etc, but I can say it feels fast. its faster than the original spinning desk drive was and I'd say just as fast as the CF card.
Very good episode Doug! By the way, you should have included the SD cards. These are actually meant to be used as HDDs. They are used in mobile phones and gaming consoles, hence being more reliable than CFs and as fast if not a hair faster. I have one adapter which I bought from Sordan and that I am currently using on my A1200.
Cf cards are a true IDE interface straight to the Amiga IDE,thus requiring no conversion chips like sd ,they are highly reliable and i've been using them on my amigas for 20+ years. SD was never intended as a hard drive ,they were designed to work as general storage and most got their start as camera storage cards-they have evolved. Most the people who have problems with cf buy cheap brands and or fake cards. this is a common problem.
I was under the impression that most of those were simply CF to SD adapters? Where they just trick the SD into acting a like a hard drive? Not that it's bad to do that, but I understand that CF cards are natively similar to IDE drives where SD cards are not. I will have to look into it more.
@@a4000t CFs started as camera storages as well. SD, as I said, are used in consoles (Nintendo Switch is an example) and mobile phones too. Today's SD cards are not the same as those you used to know.
Hi Doug! Wanted to make the same suggestion as Mauro since today's MicroSD cards are basically guaranteed to last several years for typical usage (I've seen one Samsung warranty at 10 years, and G.Skill is products are typically lifetime). In some Android devices, I noticed that the MicroSD card integrates into the device's storage pool, and the device is free to choose where to install applications and so forth. In any case, I think we'd lose some performance in the chain of adapters needed to make this work: IDE -> CF -> SD -> MicroSD.
Great video! On my Amiga 1200 I have a long IDE cable connecting to a CF card adapter so that the CF card comes out of the small slot beside the floppy drive. That way I don't even need to open up the Amiga to access the CF card with WinUAE.
Thanks for the video :) I have a bunch of various Amigas. A1200, A600s, A500s, A500 Plus. A1200 has an ACA 1233 and uses CF card, A500 Plus uses ACA 500 with CF cards. One A600 has ACA 620 and uses a CF card. One A600 has a Furia and uses SD card due to stability issues with all CF cards. So far only one CF card has gone bad. It was a Kingston that I used as the shared card (not the bootable) on the ACA 500. Crossing my fingers that the rest of them will hold for many years to come. I have backups so it's not the end of the world if one goes bad. Thanks again. Keep the videos coming ;)
Nice collection! It is hit or miss with CF cards. My A1200 CF has been rock solid, but I had those two other lose formatting - one I could not bring back to life, but the other I could reformat and it works again.
Hi Dough, just came around this episode. Normally withe either CF or SD cards there can be some HDD led issues. Did you have any issues using either the DOM or the SSD?
The HDToolbox sees all of them like a dream. Just go to add a new drive type on the left, have it read the device and they all pop right up with zero issues.
Nice and interesting episode, Doug! I only missed you explaining the "max transfer" issue. Whereever I looked in Amiga forums, people suggested that you use a max transfer rate of not more than 0x1fe00 for your IDE devices and leave the standard values of 0xFFFFFFF untouched for your SCSI devices. Many users (so did I) experienced recurríng problems with media such as CF-Cards leaving the max. transfervalue unchanged. The built-in IDE interfaces in both the A600 and A1200 really are kind of wonderbags. I can throw almost every CF-brand in any size without any trouble at my A1200, whereas with the IDE Interface in my A600, I only had success with a 512 MB Sandisk. Usually, I create my CF-Workbench Bootpartitions (and WHD-Load Partitions) with WinUAE and throw them into my Amigas when finished. Its not only faster to install, its the most reliable way for me to go as well. Concerning the size of harddisk kind of media, let´s be real: for your Amiga you´ll hardly need more than 4 GB of total disk space. If you need more, you still have the chance to extend your memory for storage with PCMCIA to CF Adapters (using Fat95 even FAT formatted for your PC) in both the 600 and 1200 for putting and importing fresh Amigafiles from Aminet etc. in it ... SysInfo shows around 1,2 MB/s as data transfer rate - I think that´s OK as my 3.1.4.1 WB boots up really fast in a few seconds. In my 2000, I use icomps Buddha IDE Controller which is really remarkably faster than any other controller I used before. In my A2000, Sysinfo shows more than 2,4 MB/sec.
You bring up a good point about the MaxTransfer - I have not messed with that since 2018 since AmigaOS 3.1.4 does not need it to be changed any longer - but the older OS's do require it. Sysinfo hard drive speed is a bit misleading, as I think it is measuring the raw speed of the controller and not the actual drive speed. If you notice when you run it, it hardly activates the drive at all, just pops back a number. It is not totally inaccurate, but the Diskspeed is more accurate.
This was really interesting.. Didnt know the little DoM things existed! They win at least for being cutest. Huh.. I had no idea the length of cable makes it less reliable/fast though, I have my cf adapter connected to the spare port on the back of the A1200 on an obviously pretty long cable. Oops? Hopefully it continues to work well. :/ (it seems fine now - I'm using a similar sandisk card..) I've lost the drive structure somewhat at least once too though, but I was messing around with stuff and kind of blamed myself.. maybe i turned the amiga off while it was writing to disk, or didnt format it right initially or something. (i did all that side in UAE... This time I did it on the A1200 and.. so far so good..?) I do monthly backups of the entire drive in UAE now just in case!
It is such a good idea to make the backups! I try to keep a copy of each on my Windows machine so I can quickly recover. I don't trust using a long cable on an unbuffered interface - it works but we are tempting fate!
Mr SEA: Yeah, you see this on all sorts of videos, which aren't in the slightest bit controversial. Some are such niche subjects that you think, who would even be watching this if they didn't find it interesting!
Excellent! I hope it works out well for you. I am very pleased with the performance of mine, and will likely keep that in my A1200 - if I can find my hard drive tray!
Great solid state drive solutions! 👍🏻 Ordered my IDE DOM from Amazon (as I had trouble with “Amiga On The Lake” shipping my order😒..still waiting on software order from October 2019). Keep up the great work and cool solutions. 😀
Awesome! What size did you end up ordering? 16 Gig? Sorry about your issues with Amiga on the Lake. They are usually pretty prompt, unless there is a stock issue.
I recently installed the IDE DOM on an unmodified Amiga 1200 (3.0 Kickstart ROMs and 3.1 Workbench) with no expansion RAM. ( Had to use some trickery to partion it under 3.0 and was able to use only 4GB for now....until I install 3.X or 3.1.4 ROMs and ungrade to the newer Workbench) Wow, it is so blazingly fast! 😱 It takes under 10 seconds to boot up to the desktop and be able to begin working. I can't help but smile every time I boot up the A1200 now. 😀 This thing is just the ticket for the PATA/IDE equipped Amigas. Thanks so much for pointing these things out! 👍🏻
I had thought about trying an IDE to micro/SD interface for one of my Amigas, but ended up going with CF just because of its simplicity. I'm willing to bet though that SD cards might have the same sorts of issues as CF cards, I know I've had a few fail on my phone before. All risks considered, CF was definitely a solid choice for my A1200, I've had the same 3.1.4 install on a 16GB Sandisk card for over a year without any issues. No data corruption at all so far, fingers crossed! Definitely a good idea to back up your data though, as with anything else!
Digigear has a SD to CF adapter which replaces a CF card on the CF to IDE interface. The A1 marked SD card are better for OS style writes. The slimline Digigear adapter fits the most CF slots adapters. The digigear solution was found a bit faster than a real CF card. This info is from another Amiga channel. I do not use the Digigear units or work for them. I am a FreeDos Retro computer guy on Pentium Ones. I need ta desktop IDE to 44 pin IDE adapter. Thanks for great stuff..
@@10MARC Everyone in the Retro computing world fight to keep IDE hardware alive. The basic CF card solution is no longer common or inexpensive. I just try to help the community as you all help me. The DOM seems a nice solution for a non-gaming DOS machine. Thanks again.
I love the CF card solution because whenever I need to do something like a full Amiga system backup to my desktop PC I can just take the card out and boot up WinUAE with all the nifty JIT features and have the entire backup complete in a few minutes, whereas doing backups on the amiga would take hours
I don't mind Sysinfo, but there hard drive speeds don't really work. They take like 1 second to report back and you can't get accurate info from that. I think they may just test the speed of the interface, not the device
Another great review Doug. That SSD is available on Amazon here in the UK, and price doesn't really look that bad, slightly more expensive than similar sized Compact Flash, but still cool, might look into that if/when I can get my towered A1200 working again. I think it would be very interesting to see what the results would be if this was repeated using an IDEFix express, Elbox FastATA or AmigaKits new Fast IDE interfaces (and on one of Jens's accel cards too). Hopefully someone with the available hardware in the community can test them out.
Not a bad idea. I would just use PFS, though, as it is the only other one still supported. I honestly have not had great luck with it, but that may have been a fluke.
Great episode again Doug. Interesting about the sata2ide, I did have it running on the vampire but unreliability means that it’s not a good idea, I had to slow it down (a feature of the vamp). I did wonder why it didn’t work in my a1200 which you kindly answered I did think it would be something along those lines. I do have the speedy ide version of the accelerator from Jens but sadly my a1200 is still stuck in the office and I’m still under order to work from home.
You have A1200 in the office? Nice! I suspect that maybe my Sata2IDE would work under 3.1.4 - I have had much better luck having odd drives be recognized with those ROM chips. It also could be that my specific adapter does not support PIO 0 and will choke no matter what. I also have an m.2 > IDE adapter that never worked right under 3.1, but might crank right off under 3.1.4 - I wish I would have remembered to try that!
Every now and again they do turn up. I probably own about 6 or 7 real hard drives, and my local surplus store has a big container of maybe 100 or more 2.5" HD's for about $3 - $5 each
Doug I have the kingspec SSD like you have and I cannot get it to work. I running WinUEA and I erased the SSD with diskpart and stated Amiga with Winuea, I get to the HDtool icon, run it and get to the point where edit/define drive type. I get the drive info and when I hit OK it gives me cannot read definations. So I cannot go no further. I also have attached it to my 1200 and ran the install disk but when disktools is ran it does not see the Kingspec Pata drive. Do you have any idea of what to do? I am using 3.2 operating system.
It's a dumb bug in 3.2 - when you tell it to read definitions, you have to change the name that is in the top field - literally change it to anything else! I have no idea why you have to, but once you do, it will read and save the definitions
@@10MARC Thank you so much no one else seemed to know what the problem was, you are a life saver hehehe. This is why I watch you videos, a fountain of information!!!
Nice, interesting video again. You are very right about the quality of the drive, it matters a lot. I'm using CF with this cheap adapter. FFS is in my opinion not reliable at all. I never had a single problem with PFS3. Never a disk error, nothing. SFS is also a good file system. I format all my partitions including System partition with PFS3. CPU is also a factor running drive speed test. I can just give you some info running DiskSpeed 4.2 on my Blizzard 030 and PFS3. From beginning of test I have File Create: 199 files/sec, File Open: 307 files/sec, Directory Scan: 1913 files/sec. I only have 16MB RAM so I can not do the file test to RAM: But I took a 23MB file and copied from a folder on my Work: partition to other folder on Work: partition and it took 29 sec. All this is using OS 3.1
I set up several partitions with PFS last year - some small and some fairly large, and they both bombed out within weeks - and this was on a real SCSI hard drive (a 15,000 RPM model) - It was using OS 3.9 at the time. When Amiga OS 3.1.4 came out, I decided to try the new FFS and find it quite reliable overall.
@@10MARC Are you sure you set up everything correct? It is important to follow the directions and also format with the PFS3 formating tool. I used a disk called Amiga911. There everything you need is included and you can set up your disk with big partitions. I have 4 partitions. My disk is 32GB in total. With a clean install of OS 3.1 and PFS3 it boots in around 3 sec.
not sure if exactly what you are saying about IDE is correct. DMA is available for IDE as well as SCSI. In fact, with DMA on the zorro 2 bus there is a limit of 3.3 MB per second and will actually leave the CPU with zero time to do anything on the bus.But with a local IDE interface on an acceleratoe card, with pio and a fast pricessor you will achieve faster speeds. Know what I mean?
but no Amiga IDE onboard or zorro2 cards do DMA that i know of,they are all PIO. DMA alows the controller to send data right to ram,thus speeding it up since processor intervention isn't necessary, but where this can loose is in cache invalidation i think,so cache gets flushed. If you ever used a good scsi controller on an amiga,like warpengine scsi,Cyberstorm MKIII/ppc scsi, GVP 4060DT scsi,they rock,they are fast and move files swiftly. Pio ide is terrible on amiga,it was always a bottleneck if you do anything other than play games and need to move files. The Vampire team insisted DMA was bad on IDE early on when i talked to biggun,but he saw when they cranked IDE speed it sucked the life out of the vampire cpu. tradeoffs are everywhere in this stuff.
Not on the onboard IDE of the Amiga. That is pure PIO 0, and is hard wired into the controller with no buffer, and every bit has to be massaged... Which is likely why it can't even hit the 3.3MBS speed of PIO 0. Some add on controllers can achieve PIO 4 speeds, but I know of no UltraDMA IDE controllers for the Amiga. Those did not become popular until the late 90's.
There is one more solution without the high price of IDE SSD’s. I Use IDE to SATA Adapters in my A4000 and then I simply connect cheap SATA SSDs to it. That works fine I normally use a 250GB Samsung SSD but I also use cheap 120GB SSD’s available somewhere around 12€ to 20€. And I tested drives up to 2TB, they all worked with Kickstart 3.1.4. without any problem. In My A1200 I use an IDE to MSATA adapter in combination with an ACA1233n55 and its IDE Speeder. That machine reaches up to 10MB/sec
That is the new Hard PCB keyboard membrane I reviewed two weeks ago. It has a PCB instead of a flimsy membrane to plug into the board, and the membrane itself is MUCH higher quality. It was featured in episode 69
I just tried "Disk on Module" I always use PFS3. Sys speed showed the exact same speed as CF card. Using Diskspeed 4.2 the CF gave little better results except for avaiable CPU as you have discovered. 16% for DOM, 2% for CF. That means nothing in real world test when I played a AIFF song and the CPU meter double using DOM!! Player was "Songplayer" I might try this again as I don't understand how this could be? Transfer a big file was 1.29 mins. DOM and 1.27 from CF. I would suggest you do another video and compare FFS, SFS and PFS3. I love your videos and know how much you put into it. It is very difficult to gather all kind of information but I would not recommend DOM. As you seen from other comments it is neither any proof that DOM is more suit as a computer HDD, quality is what matters. I had a lot of solid state drives and as long as you buy from a known brand they are dead solid. Does not matter if they are CF, micro SD, USB. They will last a heck of a long time. Only ones I crashed are from unknown brands.
I am not sure I understand why the DOM consistently shows less CPU use in the tests. It really is odd. I am not sure about SFS since that has not been updated in years, but I like the idea of a FFS vs PFS video. Thanks!
I have a A600 Furia 020/33 with IDE speed up.....1.7 mb per second standard IDE....2.4 meg/sec with IDE speed up........I also have a A500+ with TF536 and get 2.6mb/sec standard IDE......and 3mb/sec (2.978 909) with Scsi quicker (aminet changes scsi priority/os quantum to 1/CIA priority to less then scsi.
I have mixed feelings about DOM's aka Disk on a Chip. Yea they are used in Industrial Controllers only every machine I have ever had with them have had their DOM Crash and Burn. I do have a couple in my A2000 for the past year and they are working well. Thing about CF Cards you find them in Industrial Machinery as well. All of my Injection Molding Machines have CF Cards accept one possibly 2. Now I have never lost a CF card per say but I have had some corruption in my IPC's and its those CF Cards that get them out of trouble. I do use CF Cards in my Amiga's and I use mostly SanDisk but I have others that I use and some work with one Amiga and not on another. I don't move my cards but what I have been doing is backing up my CF Cards using Win32DiskImager. I only have on device which loves to corrupt CF Cards so I have it off to the side because I may be doing something wrong and sometimes its best to put things aside for a bit but because I have multiple Amiga's its easier for me to do not like the person who only has 1 Amiga. Thing about IDE Drives is they are getting hard to find but I was happy to find a couple 80gb 2.5" drives for Win XP Pro notebooks that have the Rockwell Automation Software we use at work to troubleshoot our Robots or to reload software, Its a nightmare but I have the recovery tools to recreate the drives. Backups are important and backing up your Amiga is equally important and I use Win32DiskImager for that it works and its never let me down.
DOMS are interesting for sure. I really do like the size. I have had CF cards work in industrial environments for many years without fail - maybe they are just as reliable as other storage solutions
I don't find them hard to find at all. Amazon always has them in stock, and you can even walk into an Office Depot and pick up a nice CF card with no issue. I would say that SD is even less reliable, as at least the CF cards are sort of designed with IDE in mind, which is why they are so easy to implement. I do use SD in my three SCSI2SD Interfaces on my A2000, Checkmate 1500 and A4000, and they work just fine
SD is also old tech,they all came out as camera cards way back LOL. i order all my cf cards from Adorama or B&H photo and have never had a counterfeit card to date. CF cards are true ide interface thus wired straight thru. SD needs translation via the extra chip on its adapter from parallel ide to serial SD protocol. Since CF is wired straight thru you can use any cf up to 512GB,but on the SD,the adapter and its chip will determine what size card can be used,some will not support over 32GB.
@@10MARC Nice video. Amazon is a good way to get possible counterfeit Sandisk. If you had them fail i would bet they are fakes. I use Adorama and B&H photo for 20+ years now, never had a sandisk cf fail. Also,buy the extreme version of the cards,they are lifetime warranted and you can reg them on sandisk.com,free replacement if they did fail. Also dont use HDinsttools,it does bad things to rdb's.
I have seen those Amazon fakes, they are generally fairly easy to tell when looking at the listing. I always get the Prime shipped by Amazon and have had good luck.
Thanks Doug for all the work you've done on this, well done!
Cool! Thanks for the kind words. I was kind of surprised at the results, but That is why we test things!
Thanks Doug for the excellent testing and the interesting results.!! Waiting for next week again....
Oh thanks so much! I am already hard at work getting next week's show ready.
Another great episode. My IDE storage story....I started out with the original 2.5 inch IDE hard drive in my SX32 equipped CD32. I swapped that for a IDE to 4gig CF card but soon outgrew the space and switched to IDE to SD adapters. I use them in my CD32's with equipped with TF330's. I get it all setup as I like on winuae, back it up to a file, and clone that to the SD card in a simple USB reader on my windows machine. If I need to I can just re-clone the backed-up image to another SD card but so far I have been running the SD cards for over a year and have not had any issues.
That sounds awesome. I suppose as long as you get a good Adapter they would be reliable. Performance is OK with the SD Card?
That sounds awesome. I suppose as long as you get a good Adapter they would be reliable. Performance is OK with the SD Card?
@@10MARC I've not tested with benchmark tools etc, but I can say it feels fast. its faster than the original spinning desk drive was and I'd say just as fast as the CF card.
Very good episode Doug!
By the way, you should have included the SD cards. These are actually meant to be used as HDDs. They are used in mobile phones and gaming consoles, hence being more reliable than CFs and as fast if not a hair faster. I have one adapter which I bought from Sordan and that I am currently using on my A1200.
Cf cards are a true IDE interface straight to the Amiga IDE,thus requiring no conversion chips like sd ,they are highly reliable and i've been using them on my amigas for 20+ years. SD was never intended as a hard drive ,they were designed to work as general storage and most got their start as camera storage cards-they have evolved. Most the people who have problems with cf buy cheap brands and or fake cards. this is a common problem.
I was under the impression that most of those were simply CF to SD adapters? Where they just trick the SD into acting a like a hard drive? Not that it's bad to do that, but I understand that CF cards are natively similar to IDE drives where SD cards are not.
I will have to look into it more.
@@a4000t
CFs started as camera storages as well.
SD, as I said, are used in consoles (Nintendo Switch is an example) and mobile phones too.
Today's SD cards are not the same as those you used to know.
Hi Doug! Wanted to make the same suggestion as Mauro since today's MicroSD cards are basically guaranteed to last several years for typical usage (I've seen one Samsung warranty at 10 years, and G.Skill is products are typically lifetime). In some Android devices, I noticed that the MicroSD card integrates into the device's storage pool, and the device is free to choose where to install applications and so forth. In any case, I think we'd lose some performance in the chain of adapters needed to make this work: IDE -> CF -> SD -> MicroSD.
Great video! On my Amiga 1200 I have a long IDE cable connecting to a CF card adapter so that the CF card comes out of the small slot beside the floppy drive. That way I don't even need to open up the Amiga to access the CF card with WinUAE.
That sure makes things easy. I had a solution like that for a long time, but last year moved my CF card into the Amiga to keep things neater
Thanks for the video :) I have a bunch of various Amigas. A1200, A600s, A500s, A500 Plus. A1200 has an ACA 1233 and uses CF card, A500 Plus uses ACA 500 with CF cards. One A600 has ACA 620 and uses a CF card. One A600 has a Furia and uses SD card due to stability issues with all CF cards. So far only one CF card has gone bad. It was a Kingston that I used as the shared card (not the bootable) on the ACA 500. Crossing my fingers that the rest of them will hold for many years to come. I have backups so it's not the end of the world if one goes bad. Thanks again. Keep the videos coming ;)
Nice collection! It is hit or miss with CF cards. My A1200 CF has been rock solid, but I had those two other lose formatting - one I could not bring back to life, but the other I could reformat and it works again.
I've used MicroSD cards (32GB and 128GB) in my A1200. Haven't done any speed tests, but it's very fast and reliable.
Very nice! It really makes it so simple to pop them out and back up the Amiga on a PC running WinUAE, too
Hi Dough, just came around this episode. Normally withe either CF or SD cards there can be some HDD led issues. Did you have any issues using either the DOM or the SSD?
No, as long as I used the onboard IDE connector the LED for the HDD worked OK for me.
Informative. No SD card coverage but you’ve shown other options that seem very good. A little fuzzy if HDTOOLBOX in 3.1.4 can set these drives up?
The HDToolbox sees all of them like a dream. Just go to add a new drive type on the left, have it read the device and they all pop right up with zero issues.
Nice and interesting episode, Doug! I only missed you explaining the "max transfer" issue. Whereever I looked in Amiga forums, people suggested that you use a max transfer rate of not more than 0x1fe00 for your IDE devices and leave the standard values of 0xFFFFFFF untouched for your SCSI devices. Many users (so did I) experienced recurríng problems with media such as CF-Cards leaving the max. transfervalue unchanged.
The built-in IDE interfaces in both the A600 and A1200 really are kind of wonderbags. I can throw almost every CF-brand in any size without any trouble at my A1200, whereas with the IDE Interface in my A600, I only had success with a 512 MB Sandisk. Usually, I create my CF-Workbench Bootpartitions (and WHD-Load Partitions) with WinUAE and throw them into my Amigas when finished. Its not only faster to install, its the most reliable way for me to go as well.
Concerning the size of harddisk kind of media, let´s be real: for your Amiga you´ll hardly need more than 4 GB of total disk space. If you need more, you still have the chance to extend your memory for storage with PCMCIA to CF Adapters (using Fat95 even FAT formatted for your PC) in both the 600 and 1200 for putting and importing fresh Amigafiles from Aminet etc. in it ...
SysInfo shows around 1,2 MB/s as data transfer rate - I think that´s OK as my 3.1.4.1 WB boots up really fast in a few seconds. In my 2000, I use icomps Buddha IDE Controller which is really remarkably faster than any other controller I used before. In my A2000, Sysinfo shows more than 2,4 MB/sec.
You bring up a good point about the MaxTransfer - I have not messed with that since 2018 since AmigaOS 3.1.4 does not need it to be changed any longer - but the older OS's do require it.
Sysinfo hard drive speed is a bit misleading, as I think it is measuring the raw speed of the controller and not the actual drive speed. If you notice when you run it, it hardly activates the drive at all, just pops back a number. It is not totally inaccurate, but the Diskspeed is more accurate.
This was really interesting.. Didnt know the little DoM things existed! They win at least for being cutest.
Huh.. I had no idea the length of cable makes it less reliable/fast though, I have my cf adapter connected to the spare port on the back of the A1200 on an obviously pretty long cable. Oops? Hopefully it continues to work well. :/ (it seems fine now - I'm using a similar sandisk card..)
I've lost the drive structure somewhat at least once too though, but I was messing around with stuff and kind of blamed myself.. maybe i turned the amiga off while it was writing to disk, or didnt format it right initially or something. (i did all that side in UAE... This time I did it on the A1200 and.. so far so good..?) I do monthly backups of the entire drive in UAE now just in case!
It is such a good idea to make the backups! I try to keep a copy of each on my Windows machine so I can quickly recover. I don't trust using a long cable on an unbuffered interface - it works but we are tempting fate!
It always boggles me why some people add a thumbs down. Why would someone put down a benign video such as this that merely offers a good solution?
I know... And it happens to a bunch of my UA-cam friends, too. Some of us suspect it is a certain somebody (doomy) that most of us have had to block.
Mr SEA: Yeah, you see this on all sorts of videos, which aren't in the slightest bit controversial. Some are such niche subjects that you think, who would even be watching this if they didn't find it interesting!
Great job i ordered
One of those pata to ide drives myself!
Excellent! I hope it works out well for you. I am very pleased with the performance of mine, and will likely keep that in my A1200 - if I can find my hard drive tray!
@@10MARC i picked one up on ebay for under 6$ shipped.
Great solid state drive solutions! 👍🏻 Ordered my IDE DOM from Amazon (as I had trouble with “Amiga On The Lake” shipping my order😒..still waiting on software order from October 2019). Keep up the great work and cool solutions. 😀
Awesome! What size did you end up ordering? 16 Gig?
Sorry about your issues with Amiga on the Lake. They are usually pretty prompt, unless there is a stock issue.
I got the 8GB IDE DOM for $27 with free shipping from Amazon.
I recently installed the IDE DOM on an unmodified Amiga 1200 (3.0 Kickstart ROMs and 3.1 Workbench) with no expansion RAM. ( Had to use some trickery to partion it under 3.0 and was able to use only 4GB for now....until I install 3.X or 3.1.4 ROMs and ungrade to the newer Workbench) Wow, it is so blazingly fast! 😱 It takes under 10 seconds to boot up to the desktop and be able to begin working. I can't help but smile every time I boot up the A1200 now. 😀 This thing is just the ticket for the PATA/IDE equipped Amigas. Thanks so much for pointing these things out! 👍🏻
I had thought about trying an IDE to micro/SD interface for one of my Amigas, but ended up going with CF just because of its simplicity. I'm willing to bet though that SD cards might have the same sorts of issues as CF cards, I know I've had a few fail on my phone before. All risks considered, CF was definitely a solid choice for my A1200, I've had the same 3.1.4 install on a 16GB Sandisk card for over a year without any issues. No data corruption at all so far, fingers crossed! Definitely a good idea to back up your data though, as with anything else!
For sure! I try to keep a backup of all my systems on WinUAE, so even with a total failure I can recover from there. It works pretty well.
Nice episode Doug 👍
Thanks so much! Now I just have to find the silly hard drive tray for my A1200... I know I saw it a few weeks ago, but where did I put it???
Digigear has a SD to CF adapter which replaces a CF card on the CF to IDE interface. The A1 marked SD card are better for OS style writes. The slimline Digigear adapter fits the most CF slots adapters. The digigear solution was found a bit faster than a real CF card. This info is from another Amiga channel. I do not use the Digigear units or work for them. I am a FreeDos Retro computer guy on Pentium Ones. I need ta desktop IDE to 44 pin IDE adapter. Thanks for great stuff..
Awesome! Thanks so much for the information on the adapter. I will check that out!
@@10MARC Everyone in the Retro computing world fight to keep IDE hardware alive. The basic CF card solution is no longer common or inexpensive. I just try to help the community as you all help me. The DOM seems a nice solution for a non-gaming DOS machine. Thanks again.
I love the CF card solution because whenever I need to do something like a full Amiga system backup to my desktop PC I can just take the card out and boot up WinUAE with all the nifty JIT features and have the entire backup complete in a few minutes, whereas doing backups on the amiga would take hours
No doubt about that bonus!
Great video, Doug. I was expecting you included some sysinfo speed reports on those drives as well.
I don't mind Sysinfo, but there hard drive speeds don't really work. They take like 1 second to report back and you can't get accurate info from that. I think they may just test the speed of the interface, not the device
Another great review Doug. That SSD is available on Amazon here in the UK, and price doesn't really look that bad, slightly more expensive than similar sized Compact Flash, but still cool, might look into that if/when I can get my towered A1200 working again. I think it would be very interesting to see what the results would be if this was repeated using an IDEFix express, Elbox FastATA or AmigaKits new Fast IDE interfaces (and on one of Jens's accel cards too). Hopefully someone with the available hardware in the community can test them out.
Nice! Yes I am excited to see what results people get with the faster IDE interfaces.
Maybe similar tests with different Amiga File Systems?
Not a bad idea. I would just use PFS, though, as it is the only other one still supported.
I honestly have not had great luck with it, but that may have been a fluke.
Great episode again Doug.
Interesting about the sata2ide, I did have it running on the vampire but unreliability means that it’s not a good idea, I had to slow it down (a feature of the vamp). I did wonder why it didn’t work in my a1200 which you kindly answered I did think it would be something along those lines.
I do have the speedy ide version of the accelerator from Jens but sadly my a1200 is still stuck in the office and I’m still under order to work from home.
You have A1200 in the office? Nice! I suspect that maybe my Sata2IDE would work under 3.1.4 - I have had much better luck having odd drives be recognized with those ROM chips. It also could be that my specific adapter does not support PIO 0 and will choke no matter what.
I also have an m.2 > IDE adapter that never worked right under 3.1, but might crank right off under 3.1.4 - I wish I would have remembered to try that!
Just found a couple of old Fujitsu 2.5 inch drives (4 gig + 6 gig) and an Hitachi 4 gig Micro Drive :)
Every now and again they do turn up. I probably own about 6 or 7 real hard drives, and my local surplus store has a big container of maybe 100 or more 2.5" HD's for about $3 - $5 each
Thanks, great info. I use a yansen pata 16gb ssd. No issues with it at all.
That is awesome to hear it has been trouble free! I am quite happy with mine.
10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast I’m glad to hear you’re happy with yours too. It does the job. You’re right though, it does need a short ribbon cable.
Doug I have the kingspec SSD like you have and I cannot get it to work. I running WinUEA and I erased the SSD with diskpart and stated Amiga with Winuea, I get to the HDtool icon, run it and get to the point where edit/define drive type. I get the drive info and when I hit OK it gives me cannot read definations. So I cannot go no further. I also have attached it to my 1200 and ran the install disk but when disktools is ran it does not see the Kingspec Pata drive. Do you have any idea of what to do? I am using 3.2 operating system.
It's a dumb bug in 3.2 - when you tell it to read definitions, you have to change the name that is in the top field - literally change it to anything else! I have no idea why you have to, but once you do, it will read and save the definitions
@@10MARC Thank you so much no one else seemed to know what the problem was, you are a life saver hehehe. This is why I watch you videos, a fountain of information!!!
I have used 64GB and 128GB sandisk cf's on amiga,it works fine even on the stock ide.
Fantastic!
I've had a couple of CF cards die on me too (Kingston + Transcend) and have switched to SD cards.
I have certainly had more CF cards die on me then SSD drives for sure. I've even had standard SD cards Die on me more than once.
Nice, interesting video again. You are very right about the quality of the drive, it matters a lot. I'm using CF with this cheap adapter. FFS is in my opinion not reliable at all. I never had a single problem with PFS3. Never a disk error, nothing. SFS is also a good file system. I format all my partitions including System partition with PFS3. CPU is also a factor running drive speed test. I can just give you some info running DiskSpeed 4.2 on my Blizzard 030 and PFS3. From beginning of test I have File Create: 199 files/sec, File Open: 307 files/sec, Directory Scan: 1913 files/sec. I only have 16MB RAM so I can not do the file test to RAM: But I took a 23MB file and copied from a folder on my Work: partition to other folder on Work: partition and it took 29 sec. All this is using OS 3.1
I set up several partitions with PFS last year - some small and some fairly large, and they both bombed out within weeks - and this was on a real SCSI hard drive (a 15,000 RPM model) - It was using OS 3.9 at the time. When Amiga OS 3.1.4 came out, I decided to try the new FFS and find it quite reliable overall.
@@10MARC Are you sure you set up everything correct? It is important to follow the directions and also format with the PFS3 formating tool. I used a disk called Amiga911. There everything you need is included and you can set up your disk with big partitions. I have 4 partitions. My disk is 32GB in total. With a clean install of OS 3.1 and PFS3 it boots in around 3 sec.
There is always a chance things were not set up right. I believe I followed the instructions and things did work for a while for sure.
not sure if exactly what you are saying about IDE is correct. DMA is available for IDE as well as SCSI. In fact, with DMA on the zorro 2 bus there is a limit of 3.3 MB per second and will actually leave the CPU with zero time to do anything on the bus.But with a local IDE interface on an acceleratoe card, with pio and a fast pricessor you will achieve faster speeds. Know what I mean?
but no Amiga IDE onboard or zorro2 cards do DMA that i know of,they are all PIO.
DMA alows the controller to send data right to ram,thus speeding it up since processor intervention isn't necessary, but where this can loose is in cache invalidation i think,so cache gets flushed. If you ever used a good scsi controller on an amiga,like warpengine scsi,Cyberstorm MKIII/ppc scsi, GVP 4060DT scsi,they rock,they are fast and move files swiftly. Pio ide is terrible on amiga,it was always a bottleneck if you do anything other than play games and need to move files.
The Vampire team insisted DMA was bad on IDE early on when i talked to biggun,but he saw when they cranked IDE speed it sucked the life out of the vampire cpu. tradeoffs are everywhere in this stuff.
Not on the onboard IDE of the Amiga. That is pure PIO 0, and is hard wired into the controller with no buffer, and every bit has to be massaged... Which is likely why it can't even hit the 3.3MBS speed of PIO 0. Some add on controllers can achieve PIO 4 speeds, but I know of no UltraDMA IDE controllers for the Amiga. Those did not become popular until the late 90's.
There is one more solution without the high price of IDE SSD’s. I Use IDE to SATA Adapters in my A4000 and then I simply connect cheap SATA SSDs to it. That works fine I normally use a 250GB Samsung SSD but I also use cheap 120GB SSD’s available somewhere around 12€ to 20€.
And I tested drives up to 2TB, they all worked with Kickstart 3.1.4. without any problem.
In My A1200 I use an IDE to MSATA adapter in combination with an ACA1233n55 and its IDE Speeder. That machine reaches up to 10MB/sec
I tried one IDE to SATA Adapters but it did not work as it did not support PIO zero. I need to find another one that does
what is that device you have hooked up between the keyboard and the motherboard
That is an Individual Computers MK2 Flickerfixer. It plugs in on top of Lisa and creates a rock solid 31.5 Khz display
I'm talking about the keyboard ribbon cable, it is not directly attached to the header on the MB
That is the new Hard PCB keyboard membrane I reviewed two weeks ago. It has a PCB instead of a flimsy membrane to plug into the board, and the membrane itself is MUCH higher quality. It was featured in episode 69
I just tried "Disk on Module" I always use PFS3. Sys speed showed the exact same speed as CF card. Using Diskspeed 4.2 the CF gave little better results except for avaiable CPU as you have discovered. 16% for DOM, 2% for CF. That means nothing in real world test when I played a AIFF song and the CPU meter double using DOM!! Player was "Songplayer" I might try this again as I don't understand how this could be? Transfer a big file was 1.29 mins. DOM and 1.27 from CF. I would suggest you do another video and compare FFS, SFS and PFS3. I love your videos and know how much you put into it. It is very difficult to gather all kind of information but I would not recommend DOM. As you seen from other comments it is neither any proof that DOM is more suit as a computer HDD, quality is what matters. I had a lot of solid state drives and as long as you buy from a known brand they are dead solid. Does not matter if they are CF, micro SD, USB. They will last a heck of a long time. Only ones I crashed are from unknown brands.
I am not sure I understand why the DOM consistently shows less CPU use in the tests. It really is odd.
I am not sure about SFS since that has not been updated in years, but I like the idea of a FFS vs PFS video.
Thanks!
Power computing fast ata with an 80pin udma cable I used to get pio 5 on my A1200 with a ppc240mhz 040/40mhz 🙂
Well that must have been pretty quick! Sounds like the entire system was fast! I have never even seen a PPC card for the Amiga IRL.
DOM are the best for a1200 /a600 !
They really do work nice, and have been quite reliable! I enjoy mine.
With ACA1233n 55 i got 4,854,518 on nonbuffered ide spliter and sd to ide
SD card for me.
Nothing wrong with that. Are you using a CF to SD adapter?
@@10MARC SD to IDE adapter for the main "hard disk" of the Amiga, SD to PCMCIA for data exchange with other computers.
I have a A600 Furia 020/33 with IDE speed up.....1.7 mb per second standard IDE....2.4 meg/sec with IDE speed up........I also have a A500+ with TF536 and get 2.6mb/sec standard IDE......and 3mb/sec (2.978 909) with Scsi quicker (aminet changes scsi priority/os quantum to 1/CIA priority to less then scsi.
That is not a bad speedup at all - the 2.4 MBS is much closer to the theoretical 3.3 MBS that PIO is capable of. Very nice!
I have mixed feelings about DOM's aka Disk on a Chip. Yea they are used in Industrial Controllers only every machine I have ever had with them have had their DOM Crash and Burn. I do have a couple in my A2000 for the past year and they are working well. Thing about CF Cards you find them in Industrial Machinery as well. All of my Injection Molding Machines have CF Cards accept one possibly 2. Now I have never lost a CF card per say but I have had some corruption in my IPC's and its those CF Cards that get them out of trouble. I do use CF Cards in my Amiga's and I use mostly SanDisk but I have others that I use and some work with one Amiga and not on another. I don't move my cards but what I have been doing is backing up my CF Cards using Win32DiskImager. I only have on device which loves to corrupt CF Cards so I have it off to the side because I may be doing something wrong and sometimes its best to put things aside for a bit but because I have multiple Amiga's its easier for me to do not like the person who only has 1 Amiga. Thing about IDE Drives is they are getting hard to find but I was happy to find a couple 80gb 2.5" drives for Win XP Pro notebooks that have the Rockwell Automation Software we use at work to troubleshoot our Robots or to reload software, Its a nightmare but I have the recovery tools to recreate the drives. Backups are important and backing up your Amiga is equally important and I use Win32DiskImager for that it works and its never let me down.
DOMS are interesting for sure. I really do like the size. I have had CF cards work in industrial environments for many years without fail - maybe they are just as reliable as other storage solutions
Also, CF cards are old tech and harder to come by than their replacement SD cards.
I don't find them hard to find at all. Amazon always has them in stock, and you can even walk into an Office Depot and pick up a nice CF card with no issue.
I would say that SD is even less reliable, as at least the CF cards are sort of designed with IDE in mind, which is why they are so easy to implement.
I do use SD in my three SCSI2SD Interfaces on my A2000, Checkmate 1500 and A4000, and they work just fine
SD is also old tech,they all came out as camera cards way back LOL.
i order all my cf cards from Adorama or B&H photo and have never had a counterfeit card to date. CF cards are true ide interface thus wired straight thru. SD needs translation via the extra chip on its adapter from parallel ide to serial SD protocol.
Since CF is wired straight thru you can use any cf up to 512GB,but on the SD,the adapter and its chip will determine what size card can be used,some will not support over 32GB.
@@10MARC Nice video. Amazon is a good way to get possible counterfeit Sandisk. If you had them fail i would bet they are fakes. I use Adorama and B&H photo for 20+ years now, never had a sandisk cf fail. Also,buy the extreme version of the cards,they are lifetime warranted and you can reg them on sandisk.com,free replacement if they did fail. Also dont use HDinsttools,it does bad things to rdb's.
I have seen those Amazon fakes, they are generally fairly easy to tell when looking at the listing. I always get the Prime shipped by Amazon and have had good luck.
1 gb hdd