30 Mar
2001
30 Mar
'01
5:19 a.m.
--- Julian Richardson <JRichardson(a)softwright.co.uk> wrote:
Do all 1200's come with built in IDE hard drive
controllers - or did
commodore do things on the cheap and only add controllers for machines
shipped with drives (I'm assuming the controller lives on the main board
itself)?
AFAIK, yes. The A600 was available with and without drives and ISTR the
ROMs were different, but I've owned just about every other model than that
and can't comment from personal experience.
Will the 1200 accept any size (capacity) drive? Or
wasn't the OS / ROM code
hard-drive aware and cheated by making the drive look like a big floppy (I'm
sure there were systems which did this, but I can't remember if the amiga
was one of them)?
There are no inbuilt _intentional_ (i.e., marketing driven) size limitations
beyond the usual sorts of things one gets trying to bolt a drive onto a ten-
year-old system that never conceived of a monsterous storage device. I think
there is a general 4Gb limit on disks, SCSI or IDE. I know there is an issue
with the FFS and number of blocks in the device. I have personally never put
anything over 4Gb on an Amiga, but have had lots of luck with 20Mb on up to
1Gb.
Presumably 2.5 drives are the preferred method - but
there's nothing to stop
3.5" IDE drives being used with a suitable adpator (OK that's actually an
IDe question - I think it's just the connectors that differ between them
though, right?)
The 2.5" connector provides power as well as data. If you address that issue,
yes, you can use an adapter to hook a 3.5" device (or 5.25", like a CD-ROM)
to your A1200.
On the hardware side of things, someone said the
1200's IDE controller is
basically unbuffered I/O straight to the CPU (which sounds possible
certainly with IDE) and so it's real easy to toast things - is that true?
It's true. In general, IDE tends to be a fairly raw interface, although as
machines have evolved, it's not as raw as back in the 386 days.
What are the options of networking a '1200
(ideally TCP/IP stack on the
Amiga, using SLIP or something to a Unix box maybe? Are there things around
that allow this, with NFS mounting of drives for data copying?)
Since I've never owned as 1200, I can't speak to the myriad of hardware
options, but there are TCP/IP stacks for AmigaDOS and clients such as
NFS clients, Web Browsers, Samba servers. If you want the storage on the
UNIX box to be accessible by the Amiga, NFS is a good way to go. If you
want the other way around, Samba fits the bill. I do not know if there is
a freeware implementation of NFS Server for AmigaDOS (there was at least
one commercial one)
-ethan
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