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      /  Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
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olsen 
Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 13-Nov-2016 11:10:35
#1 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 15-Aug-2004
Posts: 774
From: Germany

I'm currently looking into resolving a software problem which may not actually need to be resolved, because the hardware is so old.

This concerns the A2090, A2091 and A590 hard disk controllers made by Commodore between 1987-1989. If my information is correct, the A2090 only worked with an "XT" hard disk drive, while the A2091 and A590 would support "XT" hard disk drives as well as SCSI hard disk drives.

Now comes the question: is anybody still using these "XT" hard disks? Specifically, are you using them with Kickstart/Workbench 1.3, or did you upgrade your machines to Kickstart/Workbench 2.04 or even 3.1? Does this actually work?

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Dandy 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 23-Nov-2016 12:52:30
#2 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@olsen

Quote:

olsen wrote:

I'm currently looking into resolving a software problem which may not actually need to be resolved, because the hardware is so old.

This concerns the A2090, A2091 and A590 hard disk controllers made by Commodore between 1987-1989. If my information is correct, the A2090 only worked with an "XT" hard disk drive, while the A2091 and A590 would support "XT" hard disk drives as well as SCSI hard disk drives.

Now comes the question: is anybody still using these "XT" hard disks? Specifically, are you using them with Kickstart/Workbench 1.3, or did you upgrade your machines to Kickstart/Workbench 2.04 or even 3.1? Does this actually work?



Phew - that's quite a looong time ago.
At some point I got an A590 together with an second hand A500.

On the 'Big Book of Amiga Hardware' website they have an article on the A590 - and on the A2090 / A2090a / A2092 / A2094 as well.

On the A590 page they write:
The A590 is a hard drive controller which connects to the side expansion slot of the A500. It provides both a SCSI controller, and an XT controller. An XT Controller is the very old 8bit IDE standard (not to be confused with ST506). Whilst it uses the same 40pin IDE cable that modern IDE controllers use, you cannot use modern IDE drives with the XT-Controller because they are 16bit. You must use XT hard drives. These were only ever made up to about 80MB in size. ...

My A590 has a 20 mB HD fitted which I never changed.
I remember having tried a 40-pin IDE drive, as well as an SCSI-II drive - both without success. Maybe you need SCSI-I drives for that...
I never got hold of an XT drive...

Furthermore it was stated that it could autoboot from Kickstart/Workbench 1.3 onwards, but I never got it to autoboot. Not with Kickstart/Wofrkbench 3.1 either...

I had to put together a "A590 Boot Floppy Disk" manually from the A590 system disks, which loaded the driver and then moved the system (command 'movesys') over to DH0: (A590).

This way the A590 worked with all Kickstarts/Workbenches from 1.2 up to 3.1 ...

For my other A500 I had built a harddrive solution myself.
I used the schmatics from the computer magazine c't to build the so called "c't-interface". This was plugged into the A500's Expansion port and offered one PC-XT slot. There I could plug in an Omti RLL Controller and connct two 65 mB RLL harddrives to it, so that I had a harddrive capacity of 130 mB (!) on my A500 back in 1989 at roughly one sixth of the price for a new A590 (which came for 1200 DM back then and had just 20 mB capacity)...
"Boil 3"served as driversoftware. From that I had to put together a bootdisk like for my A590 later on...

Ha - at some point in the ninetees I integrated a bootpic in this bootdisk, which was displayed during the loading process.
It was the boot theme of Win95 (which was just released back then) and had the writing "Windows 96 for Amiga" on it.
I can tell you - all my PC friends were shocked when they read that!

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

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Beans 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 23-Nov-2016 14:01:32
#3 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 26-Aug-2016
Posts: 447
From: Bear Delaware USA

@Dandy

MFM and RLL drives? I'd be surprised if anyone has a functional drive from that period.
And the capacities were quite low. My first MFM Seagate was a half height 5 1/4" 40 MB drive.

And even when I was actively using that, IDE drives were slowly taking over.

These days, a compact flash drive system makes far more sense for Amigas.

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bison 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 23-Nov-2016 15:32:42
#4 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Dec-2007
Posts: 2112
From: N-Space

@olsen

You could start a poll, and replace "pancakes" with "doorstops".

_________________
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klx300r 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 23-Nov-2016 21:50:23
#5 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 4-Mar-2008
Posts: 3833
From: Toronto, Canada

Quote:

Beans wrote:
@Dandy

MFM and RLL drives? I'd be surprised if anyone has a functional drive from that period.
And the capacities were quite low. My first MFM Seagate was a half height 5 1/4" 40 MB drive.

...


20MB MFM HD still working great in my A1000 with zero bad blocks, think it's a Quantum. I'm old school and like to hear the hum & whine so no CF or SD for my A1k

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! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
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Barret 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 23-Nov-2016 22:19:23
#6 ]
Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 84
From: Unknown

I have an Amiga 500 with an A590 still running Kickstart and Workbench 1.3 on the original 20 meg XT hard drive. The A590 came with 2 megs of extra fast ram and it autoboots from the hard drive.

-Jeff

[EDIT] I'm surprised that my drive still works. I think that dropping support for these old XT-IDE drives is a good idea especially if it makes it easier for those doing the programming. When mine stops working I will put a SCSI drive in.

Last edited by Barret on 25-Nov-2016 at 12:07 AM.
Last edited by Barret on 25-Nov-2016 at 12:03 AM.

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olsen 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 9:39:45
#7 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 15-Aug-2004
Posts: 774
From: Germany

@Dandy

I owned and used an A590 for a brief time during the development of "Legend of Faerghail". It shipped with a 20 MByte "XT" drive, made by Western Digital.

So, you did not replace the 20 MByte drive in the A590? Then it's probably what is called an "XT" drive, and the Amiga accesses it through "xt.device" rather than "scsi.device".

You did use this configuration sucessfully with Workbench 2.x/3.x?

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olsen 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 9:43:10
#8 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 15-Aug-2004
Posts: 774
From: Germany

@bison

Quote:

bison wrote:
@olsen

You could start a poll, and replace "pancakes" with "doorstops".

That's the big question: is this hardware still useful and needs to be supported by the Amiga operating system?

The "XT" drive in the A590 unit which I used regularly when I had not yet upgraded to my first Amiga 3000, lasted only a very short time and had to be replaced with a SCSI drive.

From what I learned, the "XT" drives were the first generation of consumer grade desktop hard disk drives. The technology was not exactly robust and the performance barely better than floppy disks. This was not built to last.

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ExiE 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 10:55:13
#9 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 18-May-2004
Posts: 450
From: Czech Amiga News

@olsen
Quote:
That's the big question: is this hardware still useful and needs to be supported by the Amiga operating system?


What do you mean by this question? Supported in next version of AmigaOS for 68k?

I would say it is time to throw away some burden from the past and this is exactly the case...

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olsen 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 10:57:33
#10 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 15-Aug-2004
Posts: 774
From: Germany

@Beans

Quote:

Beans wrote:
@Dandy

MFM and RLL drives? I'd be surprised if anyone has a functional drive from that period.
And the capacities were quite low. My first MFM Seagate was a half height 5 1/4" 40 MB drive.

And even when I was actively using that, IDE drives were slowly taking over.

These days, a compact flash drive system makes far more sense for Amigas.

The problem which I need some input on concerns one of the least-often used software found on the Amiga Workbench disk, namely the partitioning software: "HDToolbox" and a command called "prodprep".

Both of these tools have been around since at least 1987/1988, and it shows. They are complex in design and operations. The old program code which supported the kind of hard disk drives and their controller hardware of that age never was removed. You could (in theory) repartition or "prep" your 1988 hard disk with the Workbench 3.1 "HDToolbox" program and it should still work. Or could you?

The presence of this old code renders the programs more complex than may be warranted. For example, the need to "define" a drive type in "HDToolbox" before you can use it comes from limitations of the "XT" drives. Instead of the "XT" drives supplying all their configuration information, you could be required to type in cylinders/heads/sectors per track/interleave information. Commodore shipped a "drive definitions" file (a database) with the A590 to make configuring "XT" drives easier. For good measure, they put stickers on the A590 detailing which configuration parameters the drives had that shipped with them.

Another major difference between "XT" and SCSI drives is in that finding and reassigning "bad blocks" is more complicated because the "XT" drives do not perform the reassignment by themselves. You have to tell "HDToolbox" to scan the disk for defects, the defects then are stored in a database file, which you can edit. Then the reassignment can be performed by the disk driver which reads it from the partitioning information of the disk.

It's some 27-28 years after this kind of gear ("XT" drives) was used with the Amiga, and my general impression is that the code needed to support it should be trimmed. Nobody appreciates the effort that goes into keeping partitioning software operational, and even attempting to fix bugs in is like walking through a thicket of thorny underbrush. It shouldn't be like that.

This is why I asked about "XT" hard disk usage. That old code should go, or shouldn't it?

Last edited by olsen on 24-Nov-2016 at 11:53 AM.

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Hypex 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 14:37:33
#11 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@olsen

I say dump the XT code. Any usual OS3 or OS4 set up will be using ATA or SCSI.

While on the subject that MaxTransfer always annoyed me. The user should not have had to enter any setting like this nor be allowed to change it under normal circumstances. This is a hardware dependant setting and the driver should have always know what it should be set too.

Now removing a whole drive if it comes after one marked as last? Do we really need this? Dynamic scanning at boot time should be fine.

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olsen 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 20:36:45
#12 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 15-Aug-2004
Posts: 774
From: Germany

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote:
@olsen

I say dump the XT code. Any usual OS3 or OS4 set up will be using ATA or SCSI.

I would like to agree with you, but it's not up to me alone to make the call to retire this functionality. More feedback on this issue is needed. The last thing to do would be to break something that should not be broken because there is no replacement for it.

Quote:
While on the subject that MaxTransfer always annoyed me. The user should not have had to enter any setting like this nor be allowed to change it under normal circumstances. This is a hardware dependant setting and the driver should have always know what it should be set too.

One of the many icky aspects of the partitioning software and the disk driver software to complement it is that they don't necessarily play together due to oversights in design.

I believe that the settings for "MaxTransfer" and "Mask" were added due to shortcomings in the A2090 design which did not make themselves known until expansion cards for the CPU and memory became generally available for the market and sold in numbers. You could not fix the limitations of the A2090 and its DMA controller, but you could work around them.

The same later happened again on the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 when the IDE and notebook drives available at the time did not work as well as the standard would have required them to. You could compensate for their shortcomings by tweaking the "MaxTransfer" settings.

These settings could be helpful, but if you do not really need them, they just add to the pile of baffling complex properties associated with the partitioning software and the disk driver.

Here's another oddity: "HDToolbox" defaults to configure these settings for maximum permissiveness if you set up a disk on an Amiga 3000 because that machine's DMA controller lacked the constraints of the hardware designed for the Amiga 2000. But if you took such a disk, prepped by "HDToolbox" on an Amiga 3000 and put it into an A2090 on an Amiga 2000 then it likely would not work correctly unless you changed the partition "MaxTransfer" and "Mask" settings again.

I used to believe that the "Rigid disk block" (RDB for short) partitioning scheme used by the Amiga allowed for disks to be read by all Amiga SCSI (or IDE) controllers. But that is not actually the case. The RDB really just defines where the partitions begin and end, how they are set up with regard to the SCSI/IDE hardware which the disk was prepped with.

Not sure if you want to hear that, but it gets even weirder. If you prepped a disk which truthfully reported its "number of bytes per sector" parameter as anything other than 512 bytes, then very few hard disk controllers will be able to read the RDB data because they are hard-coded to expect 512 bytes per sector. Let's say that the disk tells "HDToolbox" that there are 4096 bytes to a sector. Then "HDToolbox" will lay out the RDB with 4096 bytes per sector. Few hard disk controllers will even recognize this layout.

Quote:
Now removing a whole drive if it comes after one marked as last? Do we really need this? Dynamic scanning at boot time should be fine.

You need this with SCSI storage devices, which when probed by the SCSI host controller may take a while to respond.

For safety the SCSI host controller waits rather long for the respective storage device to ring back. If you need to scan for 6 or 15 devices, and a couple of logical unit numbers, you'll be sitting there waiting for the controller to finish the dynamic scanning process.

I believe this sort of nuisance still exists today with iSCSI and Fibre Channel.

The RDB settings at least allowed to state where to stop if you knew in advance that you just had to account for one or two SCSI drives.

Last edited by olsen on 24-Nov-2016 at 08:38 PM.
Last edited by olsen on 24-Nov-2016 at 08:38 PM.

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-Sam- 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 21:31:11
#13 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Apr-2003
Posts: 3035
From: Yorkshire Dales, United Knigdom

@olsen

Personally I would think continuing support for XT drives is pretty much madness. You would want to remove the code.

Sorry A1000 XT guy

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Beans 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 24-Nov-2016 22:04:15
#14 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 26-Aug-2016
Posts: 447
From: Bear Delaware USA

@-Sam-

I'm not sure I see the logic in dumping the code, but on the flipside I'm amazed anyone would want to retain the drives.
At the time I was using them, they were a huge improvement over floppies, but they were slow and not terribly reliable.
Its amazing that there are some still around functioning.
I have some old XT controllers (and even a few early IDE parts including some of the weird 8 bit controllers that required specific 8 bit IDE drives), but using that stuff?
That just strikes me as peculiar.

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-Sam- 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 0:42:54
#15 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Apr-2003
Posts: 3035
From: Yorkshire Dales, United Knigdom

@Beans

I thought the op was saying keeping the old code makes it harder to maintain. Hence wanting to drop it. Pretty sure XT support won't be missed.

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klx300r 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 6:53:20
#16 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 4-Mar-2008
Posts: 3833
From: Toronto, Canada

Quote:

-Sam- wrote:
@olsen

Personally I would think continuing support for XT drives is pretty much madness. You would want to remove the code.

Sorry A1000 XT guy


honestly it's been running fine for all these years and I'm sure even if 'support' stopped I'd be hard pressed to find another working HD anyhow I can say though that I doubt the CF solution or probably the news SSD solutions will outlast the good ol magnetic moving part beasts, of course that will take 30+ years to prove & by then we'll all have robots keeping all the information for us anyhow

As for people asking WHY it's simply what I used back then and originality matters to guys like me. I also enjoy vintage cars and 'originality' in that hobby is not just nostalgia but it drives the overall value of the car! No one cares that the car was fitted with a 'brand new' engine that works better than the original as potential buyers want the car as close to it's original condition as possible (quirks and imperfections included).

_________________
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c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
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X1000 I BELIEVE

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Barret 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 7:14:37
#17 ]
Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 84
From: Unknown

@anyone

I just like the way the old drive sounds, both during boot up and running

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Dandy 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 8:40:30
#18 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 24-Mar-2003
Posts: 3049
From: Cologne * Germany

@Beans

Quote:

Beans wrote:
@Dandy

MFM and RLL drives? I'd be surprised if anyone has a functional drive from that period.



Well, the last time I tried, both of my ancient 65 mB RLL harddrives still worked with the A500...
Has a bit of 'Computing Stone Age"...


Quote:

Beans wrote:

And the capacities were quite low. My first MFM Seagate was a half height 5 1/4" 40 MB drive.



IIRC, you could also format an MFM drive with RLL mode to obtain more capacity (roughly 1/3 more, IIRC). That way I got my 65 mB per drive...

Quote:

Beans wrote:

And even when I was actively using that, IDE drives were slowly taking over.



Of course.
But as I already said - this way I could roughly save 1000 DM and have nearly 7 times as much capacity compared to buying a new A590 back then...

Quote:

Beans wrote:

These days, a compact flash drive system makes far more sense for Amigas.



I'm still completely on mechanical HDs - as long as they work...

_________________
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Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

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Beans 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 12:57:36
#19 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 26-Aug-2016
Posts: 447
From: Bear Delaware USA

@klx300r

Quote:
of course that will take 30+ years to prove & by then we'll all have robots keeping all the information for us anyhow


At 55, I doubt I will live to be able to contest your contention.
I guess I'll have to mull it over on the way to work in my flying car.

BUT, if the last 30 years are any indication, what the world will be like in thirty years is going to be hard to predict.

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scuzz 
Re: Anyone still using A2090/A2091/A590 "XT" hard disks?
Posted on 25-Nov-2016 17:25:29
#20 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 30-May-2004
Posts: 365
From: New Forest United Kingdom

@olsen

XT 20MB Western Digital 93028-X A 782 Cylinders 27 Sectors per track No of Heads 2 Type XT. I have two of them working one with my A500 the other on the Checkmate

The A590 is shipped with DIP switch 1 set to on; this enables the Autoboot ROMs for Kickstart 1.3. If you are using Kickstart 1.2, set DIP switch 1 to off.

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/amiga_scuzz86.htm

The units are currently in store but were working fine recently. I have the GVP set up on my 500 and with limited space I put the 500s away.

That really is one brick of a hard drive.

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a590/a63_a59003.jpg

From the blurb on my site ....

An A1500 ( prior to Commodore version ) with A500 fitted
Included also is an A590 XT 20Mb version sidecar with half Mb plus
additional external 50MB hard-drive, 5.25 and 3.25" external
floppy drives, and a 1084S monitor. The machine is fitted with
the 2.04 OS and version 2.0 Roms. Probably retailed for about
£1200 in its day

Other features for this machine include the Megachip 2000/500
giving 2Mb of chip RAM, the Multistart II which allowed the
installation of the Kickstart V2.0 ROMS, Workbench Management
System 2.0 by TTR, teletext add-on and scanner.

Evidently the popularity of this model concerned Commodore
sufficiently to warrant the release of the official A1500
to the UK market only

It could be punching from the other hard drive though.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_amiga_inframe.htm

Last edited by scuzz on 25-Nov-2016 at 05:30 PM.
Last edited by scuzz on 25-Nov-2016 at 05:28 PM.

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