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1979-12-31
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»CL8:»SML:--------------------------------------
»CL9:»BIG:Review - »SML:Power Flyer A1200 E-IDE
Controller
»CL8:--------------------------------------
»CL4: by Bucko
»CL0:While Amiga Technologies continue to
plug away at the new Amiga standard
(we hope), innovative third party
developers keep coming out with great
new upgrades for the classic range.
The Power Flyer from Power computing
is one such innovation, it brings
Enhanced IDE to the Amiga A1200,
along with support for hard drives
over 4gb and an extra IDE port, the
Power flyer promises full plug and
play compatibility and transfer rates
as high as 16.6mb/sec. Tempted yet?
The asking price is around £50gbp
which is reasonable considering the
small market for Amiga goods these days.
»PIC:Atomic.320x128»
»CL0:The Power flyer ships in an innocent
looking white cardboard box with a
single floppy disk and a photocopied
manual. Installation of the board is
tricky to say the least, and is not
helped by the fact that most boards
will not fit without modifications to
the under side of the unit. To
install a power flyer you need to
remove your kickstart ROMs and mount
the power flyers PCB directly into
the sockets underneath them. The ROMs
are then positioned on sockets on the
power flyer. A further clip is placed
on top of the Gayle chip and a wire
is attached to one of the pins on the
now disabled IDE interface on the
motherboard. This wire will allow the
hard drive activity LED to activate,
but because the manual is so poorly
photocopied it is practically
impossible to identify the correct
pin. The board tested would not fit
onto the motherboard without having
the solder trimmed on the underside
of the card, Power computing now
supply a kit to raise the board a
little to avoid possible problems
like this and also to ease the
installation of clock port
peripherals.
Once you have negotiated the
difficult installation and connected
your hard drive and any other IDE
devices you are ready to power on.
The board comes with just one driver
diskette and because the board
replaces the original scsi.device
(the IDE device with the wrong name)
the only thing that needs to be
installed is one line in the startup
sequence to activate the fast CD-ROM
driver and an optional prefs program.
My Power Flyer incorrectly identified
my hard drive as PIO 3 which resulted
in some nasty read/write errors,
after correcting the problem in the
installation everything worked fine,
but this problem should never really
have occurred and could have caused a
less experienced user to loose their
entire hard drive.
Traditionally reviews of products
like this carry some silly benchmarks
to back up or otherwise the claims
that the manufacturers of the product
make with regard to its performance.
Personally I am far too lazy to take
any benchmarks, and I think that what
you really want to know is does it
make a notable difference to hard
drive performance? The answer is yes,
but a reserved yes. Powering on with
a power flyer will see your workbench
loading much quicker and copying
files is greatly speeded up. Problems
such as poor speed when searching
directories with many small files and
also the deletion of large files such
as ISO images are not solved. This is
because the problem lies not with the
poor performance of the IDE
controller, but with the archaic
`fast` file system.
»PIC:DarthVader160x80»
»CL0:Help is at hand however, in the shape
of Professional Filing System II from
Great Effects Developments. I really
cannot recommend this software enough
for owners of the Power Flyer, you
certainly will not feel the full
benefit of the controller unless this
is installed. PFS 2 offers speeds
that are at least as fast as, if not
faster than the infamous FAT 32 on
the PC, without the ridiculous 16kb
cluster size. Owners of E-IDE Amiga
disk controllers should consider a
copy of PFS2 as essential as a copy
of Turboprint is for your Amiga
printer. This does of course make the
asking price even higher, but then
you would not even be considering
this card unless you were a real
Amiga nut just like myself.
»CL0:Aside from hard drives, the power
flyer supports any Atapi/E-IDE
compliant device. So far the only
other device I have tried is my
CD-ROM drive, which now ISO`s a disk
at full speed rather than the abysmal
4x speed MakeCD was originally
reporting. Those who use IDE burners
report some problems when burning in
that the power flyer is somewhat CPU
hungry, this did not seem the case
with any of the devices tested on
this unit, but is worth bearing in
mind if Amiga CD creation is what you
desire.
In summation I can recommend this
card to anyone who wants to get more
speed out of his or her A1200 IDE
controller. Amiga hardware is
expensive but if you are fanatical
enough to go through with the
financial outlay and the somewhat
tricky installation of both the Power
Flyer and PFS 2 software then you
will not be disappointed. If you
regularly burn CDs on your Amiga then
this card is something of a must buy,
combined with PFS 2 the speed
increase is fantastic when dealing
with large ISO images and it also
makes ISO image creation on the fly a
possibility.
»CL9:Overall »CL7:8 »CL8:out of 10
»CL0:- Good product but hard to install.