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REVIEWS
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HardDrive.rvw
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1988-04-09
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Amiga 1000 C Ltd 33 Meg Hard Disk
reviewed by Greg Ford
The Amiga 1000 has an elegant, slim design that looks good, but does not
allow enough room for the easy installation of internal Hard Disk drives.
Fortunately, several third-party manufacturers have released external
drives in the 20-40 Megabyte range. This review looks at the C Ltd 33 Meg
Hard Disk.
Hardware:
The drive is finished in Amiga-beige and measures 6.25 x 4.25 x 13
inches.
A pass through SCSI Host/Controller Board plugs onto the expansion port of
the A1000, and provides for up to 7 additional drives to be daisy-chained
onto the system. The Host/Controller is connected to the drive with a
cable long enough to allow the drive to sit on either side of the computer.
Auto-config is supported under KS/WB 1.2.
The drive is externally powered from the mains, with the power switch
being located on the rear panel. Difficult to get to, but out of the way
of prying fingers!. There are two 50 pin SCSI connectors as well, one
goes to the controller board at the computer, and the other allows
daisy-chaining to additional drives.
The standard of finish of the drive was a little disappointing. The high
impact plastic case is poorly fitted, and the 50 pin SCSI connectors on
the back of the drive do not have retaining clips or screws. This could
allow the plug to work loose with potential dire consequences should the
plug fall out while the drive is on!
Internally, the drive is rather messy, with trailing wires, and a totally
exposed power supply. The 240 volt power switch is exposed, and the
(noisy) fan is mounted on a piece of tinplate that I swear was shaped
with tin-snips!.
The drive itself is an OKI and appears to be quite rugged and well built.
The SCSI Host/Controller board is well finished, but has several
protruding screw heads that are badly placed, and could mark the side
of the computer if you are not careful at installation.
Most of these criticisms are however, relatively minor, and the drive has
proven to be reliable and pleasant to use over a period of several months.
The controller card draws 350mw from the computers power supply. If you
are running extra memory boards or peripherals, you should check that
you will not exceed the Amiga's power supply limits (said to be only
1000mw, but seemingly unburstable).
Software:
The drive comes pre-formatted, and includes about 10 megabytes of Public
Domain/Shareware software. This software includes demonstrations of BEST
Business Management and Logistix. There are also numerous paint, font
editing, terminal and utility programs. The Hard Disk Utilities directory
contains software to allow you to park the heads, format the drive, and
generally manage the drive efficiently. Many help files are provided,
and the standard of documentation provided on the disk, and in the
Instruction Manual is generally high.
A Backup program is provided which is easy to use, and provides
incremental and file backup, with an exclude option, printer logging,
an options configuration log, data compression and speech synthesised
floppy disk requests!!.
The program is however, slow, and takes about 2 1/2 hours to back up the
whole hard disk.
A Workbench/Boot diskette is provided, with several startup-sequence files
that you can customise for your own purposes.
Documentation:
The Instruction Manual is a 42 page A4 sized, corner stapled booklet,
and is quite comprehensive, covering installation and setup in easy to
follow steps, with technical descriptions and diagrams of the equipment,
and sections covering adding additional drives, mountlists, formatting
and trouble shooting.
No index is provided, but the manual is small enough to be manageable
without one.
Performance:
Many of the U.S based reviews of Amiga hard disks criticise the slowness
of these drives compared to MS Dos machines. While this is generally
true, it is partly the blame of AmigaDOS. This should be corrected in
the soon to be released 1.3 version of the operating system.
That's not to say that the C Ltd Drive is a slouch. It is significantly
faster than floppies. Windows open almost immediately, and CLI commands
are effectively instantaneous. The drive is very pleasant to use, and
feels "snappy".
The following timings were made:
Floppy C Ltd
Load DPaintII from Workbench to selection screen 15 6.5
Load Scribble! from Workbench 14.4 8.0
Load AmigaBasic from Workbench 11 5.4
And for the more technically minded:
File Creations / sec 6
File Deletions / sec 13
Dir scans / sec 49
Seek / Reads / sec 52
Write a 8192 byte file 18145 bytes / sec
Read a 8192 byte file 32557 bytes / sec
(using DiskPerfA)
Using the Drive:
The drive appears on Workbench with an Icon that looks like the drive,
and can be used like an ordinary floppy (or about 38 of them!). Mine has
the volume name AM-33, which is C Ltd's model number. From CLI you can
address the drive as DH0: At boot-time, the startup-sequence file on the
floppy disk MOUNTs the drive, then executes a start file on the hard
disk which then ASSIGNs all AmigaDos devices to DH0: so that it is not
necessary to keep the boot floppy in the internal drive.
All dos commands etc are subsequently taken from the hard disk, thus
speeding up response time. The increased data transfer speed lets you
load up all those useful utilities (like Anytime, Grabbit, Screenblanker
etc) from the startup file on the hard disk without having to wait
forever.
Many of the popular software packages such as DPaint, Scribble!,
Superbase, VIP Professional, Butcher, Audiomaster etc can be loaded
directly onto the drive, although several need to be "deprotected" first,
by a program such as Marauder. This is one of the few valid uses of such
copy programs, so make sure that you only use them for floppy - hard
disk transfers or backups.
Some software requires a knowledge of CLI to install.. a good excuse to
start learning!.
Of course the best thing about a hard disk is the large amount of on-line
storage available. You can condense that (ever growing) box of floppies
down to a single drive, and everything is available immediately.
Conclusion:
The C Ltd hard Disk is a product that is nicer to use than the
specifications would suggest. It is on the average only 3-5 times faster
than floppies, but gives you convenience and large storage. Reliability
appears to be good despite the low standard of finish. A phone call to
the manufacturer in US was met with assurances that the new shipments of
this product have been re-engineered to higher standards of finish.
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