SSD on Amiga?

[Photon]

For 75 EUR you would get a plenty fast enough IDE SSD which should boot fine and be great for Amiga. But as I said, you'll probably be quite satisfied with a good CF card, which slashes the costs to under 30 EUR. Both will beat the crap out of any harddisk.

In either case, you need the SCSI-IDE-adapter. Check out the lower priced alternative to the ACard one. (Some thread here)

[NovaCoder]

This is what I just brought for mine IDE SSD

[thgill]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

This is what I just brought for mine IDE SSD

Ohhh, I was looking at those the other day as they look to be a really great value.


Tell us how well it works for you as I am very interested in one myself.

[NovaCoder]

Yep, will let you know how it goes soon

[NovaCoder]

Ok I'm happy to report that this SSD HD module works fine in a Miggy, HD light works and it's a nice neat and fast alternative to a CF card....it's also very fast.

[desantii]

Just as reerence I get about 8.5Mb/s in a stock 4000T(040) using the built in SCSi and a SCSI-IDE adpator to use a CF card

[Photon]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

This is what I just brought for mine IDE SSD

So you got a Kingspec Yeah, I was happily surprised by mine and I'm glad there are Hong Kong dealers that sell all kinds of gadgets

8.5MB/s... hmmmmm, that is way more than I expected, actually. I'm a bit jealous of your A4000T setup

That could be an interesting datapoint for Performance Gather 2011, if you feel like it. It doesn't have to be SysInfo for these kinds of speeds.

[fitzsteve]

I had one of these it was hugely fast when I set it up in WinUAE but I pugged it in the Amiga the wrong way round and fried it

I never got to see what speeds I'd have got through the FastATA...

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I had one of these it was hugely fast when I set it up in WinUAE but I pugged it in the Amiga the wrong way round and fried it

I never got to see what speeds I'd have got through the FastATA...

Mine's plugged straight onto the IDE-Fix Express adapter which is a nice and neat solution and seems to be going great guns. I'll open up a thread soon for my 1200 build-up and post some pics.

[droopy]

Another option for faster disk is to use an NAND flash drive. I use a kingspec DOM drive
with male conector and just plugged it in to my IDE cable and it showed up fine and was easy to format. Takes verry little power and is absolutely quiet and not to expensive.
I got a 4 GB one for about 25 USD.

[jimbob]

How are those kingspecs from a couple of years ago holding out? I'm thinking of getting something like this for A1200 with fastATA-

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3104000666...84.m1438.l2649

[hiho]

I had no success getting an SSD to work on my A4000T. In the end, I just went with a dual-CF setup.

I know this is an old thread but I happened upon it while searching for some info on adding an SSD to an Amiga 1200. I think I can shed some light on what the underlying reason is behind why some SSD's and CF cards work and other don't on the Amiga. Believe it or not the Amiga isn't the only system that has an issue with this sort of stuff.

The underlying problem has to do with support for PIO and UDMA modes. Specifically on the Amiga 1200, it doesn't support UDMA 0-4 transfer modes, so the connected storage device needs to be able to work in PIO mode.

In other words, the HDD/SSD/CF card needs to be able to talk slower to the system. Most CF cards are supposed to support PIO modes 1-4 to be considered compatible with CF specs but as time has progressed a lot of extremely fast cards dropped support for PIO mode since modern devices don't need it.

The same is true of SATA SSD's believe it or not.

I have two really old laptops laying around; a Dell 1010 mini and an IBM Thinkpad T61. On the Dell I couldn't install any modern SSD in it even though it has a SATA port. The reason? The controller on the logic board was gimped to only run at PIO4 speed. If you try to use one what happens is that although the system will see it, if you try to partition it the drive conks out. If you somehow manage to partition the drive, forget about installing an OS because it corrupts the entire drive. I can then take that drive, erase it, and install it in a newer system, and it'll work fine.

Almost the same thing happens with the T61. I actually gave that laptop to my parents many years ago and at the time I installed an old SATA II 64GB OCZ SSD in it. That drive worked great with the system ironically. After they filled that drive up I tried to install a SATA III 128GB drive in it. Well... the machine was having none of that! It looked like it worked but what happened is that in the course of two weeks it managed to corrupt all the data on the drive. I ended up putting the old OCZ SSD in and it's been working fine for about four years now.

On the Amiga side of things this is probably 99% the reason behind why cheap Kingston 4GB CF cards work fine but if you use any size SanDisk Ultra the Amiga throws a fit. You'd have better luck with a cheap SanDisk SDCFB-64-A10 instead since it's specifically made not to be a performance card.

For SSD's, you'll have better luck with a drive that is at max SATA-II compliant (or more specifically, that's been my experience so far on old PC systems). Once you venture into SATA-III compliant drives you wade into uncharted territory fraught with sharks and other things that bite.

I'm actually in the middle of restoring my Amiga 1200 back to operating condition. Besides recapping the board, adding an Indivision AGA, adding network capability, redoing the power supply, and upgrading the ROMS to 3.1, I am adding solid state storage to it too. I went ahead and bought an IDE to CF adapter as a contingency plan but my main plan is to install my old ADATA S599 64GB SSD in it VIA an IDE to SATA adapter that I had laying around. If I'm right it should work fairly well since it's an old SATA II SSD that wasn't particularly speedy for it's time but is still faster than any HDD on the planet. I'll probably pick up an Amigakit buffered IDE interface (http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=194) to see if it makes a difference too.

[grelbfarlk]

I've not had problem with Sandisk Ultra CF cards on A4000 IDE or in a SCSI CF reader or SSDs with SATA->IDE->SCSI adapters and have used them on the WarpEngine, GVP T-rexx-II, CSPPC err and Fastlane and A4091. Mostly it's just a matter of having NSD working/PFS/and proper HDToolbox settings. There were a couple instances where one controller didn't like the partition parameters the other was fine with and I think that was the CSPPC worked with inordinately large sector counts on a 64GB CF or maybe it was sectors per heads that the other controllers didn't like. Fixed that though by juggling the parameters a bit.

[Toni Wilen]

Sorry but that sounds like guesses and assumptions only, no hard facts and I only accept hard facts when it is about HD compatibility problems

PIO not being supported is highly unlikely because SSDs and CFs still work fine in most ancient hardware (Old BIOSes use PIO). AFAIK PIO0/1/2 is still the default mode when drive is powered up. Drive detection would fail if controller is PIO only and drive is DMA only (Getting the device information data requires single block transfer). It simply can't work partially. There are lots of reasons for compatibility problems without it having anything to do with transfer mode. It can be as simple as stupid BIOS getting confused when drive has features that bios does not expect. (Yes, it should have ignored "reserved" bits but.. Also many previously defined config bits have been marked as obsolete, some drive manufacturers set "correct" values to match older ATA specs, some ignore those.)

All Sandisks are always worked fine here, include ultra variants. (You sure it isn't the usual maxtransfer problem or using >4G CF without correct patches/filesystems?)

EDIT: Actually it seems to be mandatory to have PIO because only way to get the drive type, what it supports etc.. is to execute identify device which needs data transfer and only guaranteed safe mode is PIO.

[Daedalus]

Yep, any Sandisk Ultra cards I've tried have worked fine on the A1200 IDE port - in fact, Sandisk ultras tend to be recommended above most other cards. I've had some Kingston work and some not for example.

Using a SATA-IDE adaptor adds a layer of complexity (and therefore potential incompatibility), although a number of Amiga users happily use such setups so no harm trying it if you have it lying around.

That buffered interface you linked to won't make much of a difference speed-wise as the transfers are still carried out by the CPU.