Amiga Tools 4/Amiga Tools 4.iso/text+faqs/reviews/delldx9.txt

Internet Message Format | 1995-12-03 | 9.9 KB

Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett
From: [e-mail] (Harv Laser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Dell DX9 High Density external floppy drive
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Date: 30 Nov 1995 03:31:50 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 227
Sender: [e-mail] (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <49j8j6$[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Harv Laser)
NNTP-Posting-Host: quincy.cs.umass.edu
Keywords: hardware, floppy, high density, commercial
Originator: [e-mail]


PRODUCT NAME

    Dell DX9 High Density external floppy drive for Amigas


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    A tiny, relatively inexpensive add-on for any Amiga computer.  It
gives your Amiga the ability to read from and write to high density format
floppy disks in various OS formats, depending on what filesystem is
installed.


COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:        Anti Gravity Products
    Address:    456 Lincoln Blvd.
            Santa Monica, CA 90402
            USA

    Telephone:    [phone] or 1-800-7GRAVITY
    FAX:        [phone] (West Coast USA)

        Email:          [e-mail]


LIST PRICE

     Anti Gravity sells this drive for $125 (US). I do not know if that
is different than the manufacturer's list price or not, nor do I know the
names of other dealers who carry it.


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        Any Amiga computer with a free floppy drive port.

    SOFTWARE

        CrossDOS or similar for access to MS-DOS HD floppies
        MaxDOS or similar for access to Mac HD floppies
                (Amiga OS can already handle Amiga HD floppies)


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

    Amiga 1200, 2 MB chip RAM, 8 MB fast RAM
        AmigaDOS 3.0
        GVP A1230 Turbo card with 40Mhz 030/882
        Toshiba 540 Meg internal IDE hard drive
        Commodore 1084S monitor
        Boing! three button optical mouse :)


INSTALLATION

    Connect Amiga floppy drive cable to back of disk drive.  Connect
other end of cable to floppy drive port on back of computer.  No tools
required.  Really difficult. :)


REVIEW

    I didn't particularly need to format Amiga floppy disks of 1760K
capacity, but since I go to a lot of trade shows and often get demo disks of
stuff at those shows and in the mail, and those disks are usually MS-DOS or
Mac format High Density disks, I had no way, up till now, to read them.
(Without an emulator you can't run alien software on an Amiga, of course,
but you can still suck files off their disks: any plain text files such as
press releases or source code, images in various formats and etc.)

    Standard Amiga floppy drives, while they can easily use HD floppy
disk media and format it to 880K (Amiga) or 720K MS DOS (with CrossDOS built
into the system software) cannot access any high density formats at all.  So
this drive fills a need I'd been needing to fill for a couple years, since
HD floppies became the norm on PeeCees and Macs. (They're not yet the norm
on Amigas).

    This is quite a slick little drive. It's made by Dell, the PC Clown
manufacturer, and it is absolutely the tiniest external floppy drive I've
ever seen.  In fact, just eyeballing it, it would appear that about six of
these drives would consume the same amount of cubic space as a single old
Amiga 1010 floppy drive.

    It's about 1/2" high by maybe 4" wide by maybe 6" deep. It is matte
black in color, painted or perhaps clad with some kind of rubbery surface
coating not unlike my Newton message pad. (Guaranteed not to match any of
your typical beige computing equipment, but who cares).  My guess is that
it's designed as a laptop computer accessory and Dell has simply adapted it
to the Amiga with the special cable that comes with it.

    A label on its belly indicates that it's model number "DX9" and that
it's made in Japan.  The front face of the drive where the disk slides in
is, in fact, so short that there's literally no place on it for an eject
button! So disk ejection is via a thumb-shaped slider on the extreme front
right hand corner of the top of the drive body.  With no disk inserted, a
tiny door covers the disk opening to keep out dust and the other impurities
of modern civilization.

    The two-foot-long connection cable is interesting -- on one end is a
fairly standard-looking Amiga floppy drive connector, but on the other end
which connects to the drive is a very strange (at least I've never seen one
before) card-edge connector.  It's a green PCB with traces painted on it and
two little tabs on either side to guide it and hold it into the female
connector on the ass end of the drive.  Peering down into the cable's
connector fitting, it looks like someone has hot-glued the assembly
together.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this method of assembly --
I just mention it for the sake of completeness.

    It's a very tight fit into the drive's connector, and the cable end
isn't marked "this side up," so I took a chance and connected it with a large
white dot facing up (I assumed the large white dot on the connector
shielding meant "this side up").  This required quite a few foot-pounds of
pressure, and I had no idea if the cable was correctly seated until I
re-powered my 1200 to see if the drive was recognized.  Luckily, I had done
it correctly.  Had I put the cable on upside-down, I don't know what the
result would have been.

    A side note here: in a chat on Portal, I was telling some folks
about this drive, and one guy mentioned that his friend had bought one from
a shop in the SF Bay area, but that it had come with its own external power
supply.  My drive came with no separate power supply, and takes its power
off the Amiga's own powered pin(s) on the floppy drive port.  In fact I can
see nowhere on my drive where one could even plug in a power supply
connector.  I can only assume that there are a couple different models of
this drive.  Naturally, the one that takes power directly from the Amiga is
preferable.  I have entirely too many "wall wart" AC power adaptors already!

    Once connected, I dragged the PC1 CrossDOS driver on my 1200's 3.0
Workbench from Workbench:storage/dosdrivers into Devs:dosdrivers and clicked
it to start it up. (Rebooting would have had the same effect.)

    I also installed Media4's "MaxDOS" package which allows an Amiga to
read Mac formatted HD floppies or SCSI media.  (MaxDOS is not included with
the Dell HD drive -- I'd had it laying around for a couple months as a
review copy, unable to use it because until today I didn't have a HD floppy
drive :)

    With three different file systems looking at the drive each time a
new floppy is inserted (DF1, PC1 and MF1), the delay before it can be
accessed, and the number of blinks of its tiny front panel green light, are
lengthened by a couple seconds. No big deal, really.

    So now I have a drive which can handle all kinds of formats of 3.5"
floppy disks.

    According to Directory Opus 5's formatting requester, I can format
this sucker as:

    AmigaDOS High Density format: 1760K
    MaxDOS Mac High Density format: 1440K
    CrossDOS MS DOS High Density format: 1440K

along with regular low density formats (if a low density floppy is inserted,
I assume.  One can tell a HD floppy from a regular one by the "HD" logo on
it and by the fact that it has another square sensor hole on the opposite
side of the disk as the usual hole)

    MaxDOS has a lot of other features for handling Mac HD floppies, but
that's the subject of another review, another time.

    Nic Wilson's SysInfo 3.24 clocks the Dell HD floppy drive at roughly
the same speed as my 1200's internal standard non HD Amiga floppy drive:
about 24K/sec.  Nothing special.

    I cannot report to you the sturdiness or longevity of this drive
because I've only had it for one day. :)

    With no disk in the drive, it does click, although very quietly: a
bit less than my A1200's internal drive, and much more quietly than the old
Commodore A1010 external drives.

    With the drive came no instruction manual (don't really need one
except perhaps for the weird connector) nor warranty card.  In fact, the
drive was sent to me in a plain padded envelope inside a mailing carton.
When the UPS driver handed me this skinny package, I thought, "no way is
there a disk drive in here!"

    I asked Anti Gravity about the lack of documentation, and they told
me that's exactly the way they get the drives from Dell.  No manual and no
warranty card, but they said that the drive has a one-year warranty.


VENDOR SUPPORT AND SMALL DISCLAIMER

    In the unlikely case this drive needs warranty repair, I suppose I
would contact Anti Gravity Products. No contact information for Dell was
included.

    I also need to mention that I did not pay cash for this drive.  I
did a small bit of work for Anti Gravity involving a software manual for one
of their products and they paid me with this drive.  However, this has been
my only dealing with them and I should not be mistaken as an employee nor as
any kind of agent for them or any of their related companies.

    I wrote this review because I felt the Amiga community might like to
learn about this slick little drive, not because I felt I owed Anti Gravity
any favors.


SUMMARY

    Basically, this little drive just plain works and now I can handle
those foreign high density floppy formats for all those disks I pick up here
and there. Installation is trivial except for the slightly strange press-on
cable connection to the drive. Rather than a white dot on the connector,
they could've spent 3 cents more and put a "this side up" sticker on it!


COPYRIGHT

    Copyright 1995 Harv Laser.
    This review can be reprinted in non-commercial publications.
    To use this review for other purposes, please contact the author
    at [e-mail]


---

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