Using the Gotek as usb transfer

[Sinphaltimus]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

So you can copy files To and From the USB but can you run files from it?

"can't" - that's been my experience. The HxC mount utility or whatever it's called. I played with it for about 15 minutes. It is slow but functional. It does not MOUNT anything to the system afaik so there is nothing to run a program from. Instead, the utility itself allows you to view the content on the USB stick and with that utility you can copy files to and from it.

In its current state; useless for anyone without a hard drive unless you want to copy files from USB to floppy for some reason. And if that was the case, better off just making an ADF.

Currently, the only use I see for it today (for the average end user non-developer type) is if you have no other method to transport files to/from external sources.

[idrougge]

I think the main reason why it has not been developed into a hard drive replacement is because it will never replace a hard drive, and the target user will either be too incompetent to use it or disappointed because it works at floppy drive speeds.

[Retro1234]

Seems a shame could be great for Lucas and Sierra multi disk games.

[gonk23]

Are we talking about the HxCFE Amiga copy utility I hacked together a couple of years ago?

https://github.com/gonk23/HXCFE_Amiga_copy_utility

Originally Posted by idrougge

I think the main reason why it has not been developed into a hard drive replacement is because it will never replace a hard drive, and the target user will either be too incompetent to use it or disappointed because it works at floppy drive speeds.

That was pretty much my conclusion too.

I had a specific use case of wanting to copy large (>880kB) WHDLoad lha files to my A500 with A590 hard drive without needing to split them. What I wrote served this purpose even though it took all night to copy the files

Related thread:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=81781

I pretty much summarise what it is and isn't good for at the start of that thread. Also, it looks like there are some issues when using Gotek as the hardware (I only have pure HxC hardware and was unable to test Gotek).

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I think the main reason why it has not been developed into a hard drive replacement is because it will never replace a hard drive, and the target user will either be too incompetent to use it or disappointed because it works at floppy drive speeds.

In fact it was developed into a hard drive replacement on Atari ST ! A true hard disk driver was developed for this machine :

http://hxcmount.atomas.com/

You can use the HxC drive as a true harddisk : start softwares from C: and so on...
For amiga i am just missing a disk driver skeleton as start point...

For the speed :

Speed
Remember that the hardware is still used to access your partition. Every bytes must go through the FLOPPY disk interface. As it is a slow data bus, do not expect hard disk-like performances. However, thanks to the author of the Hxc FE hardware, the data transfert is used at burst mode. It is much, much faster than a real floppy disk. And, for the most part, the drive head seek are virtually instanteneous, probably faster than on a real hard disk. All in all, HxCmount permits "near-usesable" speed.

[gonk23]

Originally Posted by Jeff_HxC2001

For amiga i am just missing a disk driver skeleton as start point...

It's possible that the code will need some performance improvements too. My copy utility basically just uses your code to access the HxC, and does a simple buffer copy (see the "copy_file_from_hxc" function in https://github.com/gonk23/HXCFE_Amig...master/hxcfe.c) but only achieves around 3kB/s. Of course it's possible that I've done something stupid or there's something wrong with the build tools I used.

[Umpal]

Originally Posted by gonk23

It's possible that the code will need some performance improvements too. My copy utility basically just uses your code to access the HxC, and does a simple buffer copy (see the "copy_file_from_hxc" function in https://github.com/gonk23/HXCFE_Amig...master/hxcfe.c) but only achieves around 3kB/s. Of course it's possible that I've done something stupid or there's something wrong with the build tools I used.

Hi gonk32,
That little and useful tool of yours needs an update. It doesn't work anymore with the latest HxC firmware v3.3.7.4a. And some speed up would be welcomed as well