Just got a Surf Squirrel, have a few questions.

[dabone]

I won a surf squirrel off ebay (untested) and got it today.
I borrowed an old mac external hd (520mb) and a external cdrom.
Both are seen and mounted. Sometimes it pays to gamble on untested stuff. (I paid 22.50 usd shipped)

My questions are..

1. What is the largest hd I should think about hanging off this controller?
(73gb sca drives are cheap! and so are the adapters)
2. What kind of speed should I expect over the internal IDE bus.
(Currently running a sandisk 4gb cf card)
3. CD32 Emulation? Is it worth bothering with now because of WHDload?
(I'm running a 030/33 with 32 meg of ram)

[fitzsteve]

Hi I got a squirrel recently, the CD32 emulation seems to work well once I worked out how to get it to boot it supposed to boot automatically if there is a CD32 game in the drive but I have to hold the left mouse button (on boot up at exactly the right time) to get a CD32 boot options screen.

The best thing about having a CD drive on your Amiga now is Amiga CD games, have a look at this treads for some ideas:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=628823#post628823

Sorry I can't advise on the hard drives but I am sure someone will be along who can.

Steve.

[rkauer]

For the HD: just testing if the System accept such a big drive via squirrel.device (or what it calls, I don't remember).

If the drive refuse to install due the size, find its configuration in the internet and then reduce the number of cylinders to make it smaller enough. I recommend you to start decreasing the final size to 4Gb multiples: 64Gb, 32Gb, 16Gb, 8Gb and finally 4Gb.

Remember the formula:

number of cylinders: C
number of sectors per track: S
number of tracks: T
512kb ( = 524288 )

TotalSpace = 524288 x C x S x T

In an hypothetical case of a drive with a drive with 1097 cylinders, 18 sectors per track and 9 tracks, the space will be:

1097 x 18 x 9 x 524288 = 10352590848 (meaning ~ 9.6Gb)

BTW:
Using SFS instead original FFS is an interesting option.