A1200/A600 4xIDE Buffered IDE Interface from AMIGA KIT

[fitzsteve]

I received within a few days

[darkwave]

I've been waiting since late June for this IDE interface and the FastIDE adapter. It's a little on the long side.

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by darkwave

I've been waiting since late June for this IDE interface and the FastIDE adapter. It's a little on the long side.

I've been waiting since July 5th...

[chrisfi]

Originally Posted by daxb

From time to time people ask this question.

Originally Posted by darkwave

I've been waiting since late June for this IDE interface and the FastIDE adapter. It's a little on the long side.

Originally Posted by jurassicman

I've been waiting since July 5th...

Quality is not good either - The IDE cable that came with my adapter disintegrated at both ends on first use. I emailed them over 8 weeks ago and not even an acknowledgement to date.

And today Amibay has banned AmigaKit.

It's a shame. It's great we have UK based Amiga store and I would really like to support them, but their customer service is rubbish.

[amigakit.com]

@Chrisfi

Welcome to EAB. I will respond to your second post as a new user here:

We serve hundreds of customers every week by telephone, email, pmails, forums and through social media. The vast majority are satisfied and happily using their products.

Quality is not good either

If your cable has broken then pulling it by the ribbon cable with force and not easing it off the socket by the black headers will break it. If you contact us with your order number and some photos we can check if it can be repaired.

The quality of the Buffered IDE adapter is very high- we have had no complaints so far.

Amibay has banned AmigaKit.

No they have not.

their customer service is rubbish.

The silent majority may disagree with you. We are always looking to improve and meet as many of our customers needs as possible.

[SpeedGeek]

Originally Posted by amigakit.com

@Chrisfi
No they have not.

Oh, yes they have:

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php...l=1#post955173

[amigakit.com]

That was a misunderstanding and our member status should revert back to normal soon.

I am not sure why it is relevant to this original thread topic and the importance to highlight it? If you want to discuss it open a new thread and I will be happy to contribute.

[chrisfi]

@AmigaKit,
Thanks for the response.

Originally Posted by amigakit.com

@Chrisfi

If your cable has broken then pulling it by the ribbon cable with force and not easing it off the socket by the black headers will break it. If you contact us with your order number and some photos we can check if it can be repaired.

The headers on the cable have an incredibly tight grip making difficult to insert without damaging the fragile retaining clips on the clamping strips. Once that happened I was flummoxed for a while, but after a lot of struggling manage to ease the header of the motherboard with a couple of bradawls and a jewellers screwdriver.

Email with photos and order No. was sent 14 Aug 20.

Originally Posted by amigakit.com

@Chrisfi

No they have not.

Ah, yes. I see AmiBay reinstated your account early this evening and posted a sticky which provides some insight to the reason for the U-turn.

[roondar]

I actually have a question about the 4xIDE with fast IDE option. The instructions explain that a KS3.1 system needs to use IDEFIX97 to get access to the second port (I can indeed verify that the second port does not work without it).

However, IDEFIX97 instantly freezes the Amiga when I run it (and then on reset the IDE port no longer works at all - needs a power cycle to fix it). Are there some troubleshooting steps out there to fix this issue and get the second port working?

Without IDEFIX97, the first port works well enough and does indeed seem to be quite a bit faster than without the Gayle adapter. But the second port won't do anything, which is problematic.

[jurassicman]

I had a similar issue and it seems that it was due to an incompatibility with the peripheral connected in the second IDE channel. Have you tried to run idefix with a different CD/CF/HDD connected in the second channel?

[roondar]

Hmm, that would kind of suck as this is the only PATA CD-ROM drive I have (already used in in my A1200 before and it worked just fine at that time). I'll try to dig up something. Is there a list of compatible CD-ROM drives somewhere?

[darkwave]

I received the IDE Interface and Fast IDE adapter at the beginning of September.

It was a fairly long wait for a device that I thought was in stock, but I had read that orders were taking a little while to fulfill at the moment and I was willing to wait. This is the longest I have had to wait for a product from AmigaKit, having ordered many things in the past. I also have a Rys MkII USB adapter on order which is currently on the store as "Coming Soon". I guess they are waiting on a batch of those adapters.

As for the Fast IDE...

I'm running OS3.1.4 with a Blizzard 1260 clocked at 80MHz with 64Mb RAM. I have a SanDisk Ultra something-or-other CF Card as the only IDE device plugged in at the moment.

I first tried the IDE adapter on it's own to make sure that part was working. Plugged in, worked perfectly first time. At this point I got a bit excited and plugged in the Gayle adapter without first cleaning the pins of Gayle. It started to boot, but then locked up with a flashing red screen (full red, not guru). Realising that I may have been a bit hasty I turned everything off and removed the Gayle adapter and went back to just the basic Buffered IDE part. Red screen again. Slight panic at this point that I may have fried something due to my impatience. I turned everything off, waited some more and then double checked the connections, turned on and successfully booted. Relief!

At this point I thoroughly cleaned the Gayle pins with isopropyl alcohol and re-seated the Fast IDE adapter and it has been working ever since. I have not had the chance to use the Amiga a great deal yet but it feels ever so slightly nippier when loading drawers with lots of contents in Workbench.

One of the other reasons for choosing this device was the built-in PCMCIA reset fix which means I can now soft-reset the Amiga and have my network card restart properly.

In terms of speed increase, see attached for a SysInfo comparison...
2.49 Mb Fast IDE vs 1.83 Mb stock.
As a comparison I get 1.73 Mb from the stock IDE on my 68030 equipped A600.

When I get the time I'll be testing a slimline CD drive on the second channel.

[Daishi]

I currently have an A1200 with an Apollo 1240 and 4xEIDE'99 with 1 CF and one SD drives. I was wondering other than the speed increase (and the Gayle fixes that are tempting) , if I were to get the 4XIDE BUFFERED IDE INTERFACE with the FASTIDE interface are there any other benefits beyond my 4xEIDE'99.

[MoonDragn]

Does anyone know if this fast IDE adapter bypasses the chip functions inside the Gayle or does it still route everything through the Gayle chip?

I think I fried the IDE part of my Gayle and was wondering if the chip socket is just using the pins to connect to the motherboard or still routing through the Gayle?

Everything else on the Gayle is still working except the IDE part. Another words, what is that chip on the top? Just a memory buffer or a buffered gate array?

[rabidgerry]

Don't suppose if anyone can confirm if using this piece of hardware would boost my already 2.1mb transfer speed if I was to purchase?

The speeds seem quite low that people are getting with their hardware configurations (yes I know it's meant to be a medium speed type speeder) but I already get around the speeds people are reporting from using this so I was wondering would I see any more benefit in speed should I get one.

Curious to see what others experiences are using the interface and speeder.