A Quick Question

Hi, I recently purchased an amiga 1200 from ebay as my 600 has died on me.

My question is,other than ebay,is there anywhere i can buy a hard drive for it at a decent price?

Thanks in advance

[Peanutuk]

You can buy a hardrive from any where. A 2.5 "laptop" style hardrive is obviously preferable as it will fit inside. Check othe old thread on the baord for suggestions on the cheapest / best places.

Any hardrive will do - but 3.0 WB and below can only accept (I think) HD upto 6GB

As Peanutuk said, any 2.5" laptop type drive should work. It slots into the A1200 nicely (same as the A600). However, the standard Amiga filesystem (FFS) can only use 4gb of space. I believe if you bought a bigger HD, for example 20gb, 16gb would be wasted, although I'm not entirely sure about this.
If you do want a bigger HD, your best bet would be to get rid of FFS and go for a different filesystem. I believe SFS and PFS support larger HD's, although I don't know which is better (anyone else know? Give a suggestion). I do recommend however, to scrap FFS as early as possible as it only gives you problems in the long run.
Alternatively, if you want to use a 3.5" IDE HD, it is possible but it's not as easy as just plugging up the drive and screwing up the case. You need to delve in a bit more.

To summarise, get yourself a 2.5" HD and, regardless of size, switch to a different filesystem.

[Matfink]

i would have to say that eBay is probably your best bet for a cheapo hard drive...just don't search for "amiga" HD's as the prices seem to be over inflated for some reason. just get a small (by todays standards) 2.5" laptop hard-drive for next to nothing - i just bought a 534mb HD for £7 which is ideal for my game-playing needs and you can probably get bigger drives for about the same price (god i remember my dad buying a 120mb HD for our A1200 years ago and it cost a bloody fortune...how times change....)

[Korodny]

With FFS (the filesystem supplied with AmigaOS 3.0/3.1) you can only use the first 4 GB of the harddisk (you can use bigger drives, but don't touch anything beyond the first 4GB, otherwise you're doomed).

With a replacement filesystem (like the excellent SFS, which is Freeware), you can use up to 8GB - this limitation is caused be the crappy IDE driver supplied with AmigaOS 3.0/3.1.

With a better IDE driver, you can use drives of any size. Such an improved IDE driver is included with AmigaOS 3.5+. I *think* (I'm not 100% sure) that IDEFix (Aminet) also contains an IDE driver that can handle more than 8GB.

Excellent,thanks for the quick replies,and thanks for making it good news.

Not quite sure about the file systems,as it has been so long since i used an amiga,but i will be sure to look into it.

Thanks again