hard drive pin out picture
On Amiga's , often files larger than approx 128K are corrupted when copied to or
from an IDE hard drive , this situation exists as a result of the older Amiga's
IDE input not keeping up with current technology advance in speed transfer rates.
It is felt that the next generation of AMIGA's will embrace this technology
and will be reflected in the newer third party peripherals in production now.
With the release of OS 3.5, OS 3.9 and the soon newcomer OS 4.0 this was
overcome as well as the 4.3 GB barrier, the new OS limit is 20 Terra-bytes !!!
Solution:
Set "MaxTransfer" for every partition on the hard drive to 0x0001FE00, or 128K. Older IDE drives may even require setting MaxTransfer to 0x0000FFFF, or 64K. (see our HARD DRIVE Info page) for hard drive set-ups.
It may be possible that some newer drives may need a setting of 0x0000FE00 to accommodate the drive in your particular AMIGA and controller situation.
This problem is due to the way some IDE hard drives respond to requests for large blocks of data. (Note that MaxTransfer is *NOT* "maximum transfer rate" but rather "Maximum Transfer Size."), or lower power supply input to the 12volts line can exhibit this kind of symptom,make sure that your power supply can deliver the required current to the drive for proper running, ie: 12 volts consistently. Remember, hard drives consume more power at startup that actually when running .
In an Amiga situation, some IDE drives may actually be ready to be at full "Revs" on power-up, slow to spin-up to their correct operational speed.
These are "delay to spin" type drives and are slow to arrive at their nominal operating revolution minute, a design flaw ? no, not really, the engineers .
This can cause the A4000 to fail to boot. The machine may just sit there with the drive light on or off, or it may come up with the purple "Insert Floppy" screen.
Some IDE drives do this once in a while, you may hear a "clicking sound" as the drive does its self-test then decides it's not up to booting today.
It may work after a reset, or may require a power-down to revive it. This problem may occur more often with a master-slave drive setup.
Another finding was that some brands of hard drives when mounted in an AMIGA
could not sustain a constant flow of data input through their buffers .
This problem has been rectified by current technology, though older Amiga
controllers cannot avail themselves to the newer speeds, due to the lack
of good fresh drivers in HD software.
This was due, it is believed, to be due to the poor transfer rate through the inadequate buffer speed. This will not apply to all newer models however.
In some Amiga A4000's (and on Some A1200's) it is possible that the hard drives would not boot at all, resulting in the "purple" INSERT DISK screen.
A solution to the problem was researched by Unitech Electronics Pty.Ltd.
and the problem is overcome by an ingenious add-in circuit consisting of
two logic chips and a few modifications to the Mother board. This mod was
pioneered in Sydney by Unitech Electronics Pty. Ltd.and is done "In-House"
modification with a service charge of AUD$ 125.00 + GST = AUD$ 137.50
This mod we have placed on aminet as
No responsibilities is taken for errors or omissions
