Hard drive for an amiga 500+

Hello,

could anyone help me with some info? I'm trying to find how I can connect a hard drive to my old 500+ that's been gathering dust for way too long.

I know the easiest thing would be to buy an A590, but they seem rare and unavailable. Is there some modern equivalent? or is is posible to make a controller using currently available hardware/cables/connectors and trying to find an old IDE or SCSI drive to go with it? Is there even circuit diagrams anywhere so I could attempt building a connection card?

Or if anyone has a good suggestion on any realistic method to get an Amiga 500 connected to a hard drive I'd be really happy to hear from you.


Thanks for the help!

- Alan.

[laser]

Originally Posted by Alan

Hello,

could anyone help me with some info? I'm trying to find how I can connect a hard drive to my old 500+ that's been gathering dust for way too long.

I know the easiest thing would be to buy an A590, but they seem rare and unavailable. Is there some modern equivalent? or is is posible to make a controller using currently available hardware/cables/connectors and trying to find an old IDE or SCSI drive to go with it? Is there even circuit diagrams anywhere so I could attempt building a connection card?

Or if anyone has a good suggestion on any realistic method to get an Amiga 500 connected to a hard drive I'd be really happy to hear from you.


Thanks for the help!

- Alan.

The Amiga 500 haven't any kind of hardisk controller
here you can found instructions and schematics + drivers how to build one to connect any ide hardisk or ide cdrom

http://aminet.net/docs/hard/a500ide.lha

but the easy way is to buy the A590...you will save lot of headdaches

[rkauer]

Originally Posted by laser

The Amiga 500 haven't any kind of hardisk controller
here you can found instructions and schematics + drivers how to build one to connect any ide hardisk or ide cdrom

http://aminet.net/docs/hard/a500ide.lha

but the easy way is to buy the A590...you will save lot of headdaches

For my concerns, the IDE way is not too good for any plain 68000 CPU Amiga.

IDE uses a lot of CPU resources. Even the A600, with their IDE suffers accessing the HD or the CD (YES, I have one A600 with HD and a DVD hooked). But I think IDE is better than nothing!

SCSI devices, in the other hand, are faster and with the "plus" they don't sucks the small juice of 68000 CPU. So the A590 is the way to go.

[coze]

or better, GVP A500hd8+ (which is more common than a590 I guess)

[Jope]

If you have 37.300 or a newer kickstart installed, Mika Leinonen's internal IDE interface will autoboot. :-)

I think DMA vs PIO IDE is not so important since the A500 will probably not be used for anything serious. After all, many A1200 "power users" still use the internal IDE..

[laser]

also there's a scsi controller & drivers for the A500 or any amiga

http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Downloads/Scsi.lzh

it seems you only need a cheap parallel-scsi cable/adapter

Thanks a lot for help!

Does anyone know where to buy an A590 these days, or a GVP A500hd8+?

I can't open the .lha, .lzh file types at the moment, will try again when I'm back home and check out the information there.

cheers!

[alexh]

http://www.ebay.ie
http://www.amibay.org

To open LHA/LZH files on Windows you'll need WinRAR or a similar tool.

If you can, it is better to unarchive on Amiga if you can. To get Amiga LHA/LZH program check http://www.aminet.net