The old (really old) spinning HDD in my A1200 has sounded better, so I thought it was time to put it out to pasture and get a new(er) one. I had a look on Amazon, mostly because I wanted it to play with this weekend, and found a few with next day. As I was looking another item was offered to me, a MSATA to 2.5" PATA case/converter.

Basically it takes an MSATA drive and converts it to a parallel interface enclosed in a 2.5" HDD form-factor. The amusing thing was that a 120GB MSATA SSD with the converter cost slightly less than an 80GB HDD!

I took a punt that it would work and ordered it. It arrived and to my surprise it actually works! Using WinUAE I was able to transfer my instal between the drives and my A1200 is now slightly more in the 21st century with a new fangled electronic hard drive!

Gallery of images: https://imgur.com/gallery/2hQbMCn

As the enclosure is white with no markings, I made a silly little sticker to go on the unit as well :D

@smartroad

Very nice job on the sticker.
Looks professionally done.

Cheers

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@smartroad

congrats on the HD upgrade..it feels good not worrying about a HD failure doesn't it

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Quote:

TiredofLife wrote: @smartroad Very nice job on the sticker. Looks professionally done. Cheers

Thanks It's a mix of various labels. I just wanted something that looked like something that should be there. The enclosure was plain white otherwise. I mean really it makes no difference, you can't see the thing after all, but made me happy and was fun

Quote:

klx300r wrote: @smartroad congrats on the HD upgrade..it feels good not worrying about a HD failure doesn't it

I have only used the lower half of the drive as well, so hopefully it shouldn't have any issue for, well, a very very long time!

Only used the lower 60GB'ish because it isn't like the Amiga needs huge volumes and I am not going to be playing videos or mp3s on it. It is only lightly accelerated with an ACA1221ec with an 020 clocked at about 40MHz.

The only thing I don't like is not hearing it operate. On a PC that is fine as the fans etc overpower the sound of a HDD. But the Amiga is silent and so I find it odd LOL Did notice the converter has an LED in it, so maybe I could connect a piezo transducer to it so it pops and clicks as the LED turns on and off!

I have also noticed the Amiga's HDD LED is slightly illuminated all the time. Need to figure out how to sort that.

@smartroad

Using the same blocks over and over is what kills SDD disks, so I don't think that helps. Anyway, the only reason I can think of to not use the complete disk, is disk caches, that can eat up lots of RAM. Depending on filesystem and so on. As long as your using Kickstart 3.1.4 and use tools that supports NSD64, you should not have any issues with data corruption. (and don't use stupid file systems like FFS)

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 27-Oct-2019 at 10:24 AM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Most drives have wearleveling anyway so should be an issue in any case lol but didnt see the need and leaves me space for when I can play music when I have a Vampire card LOL

@smartroad

Nice work. I did the same almost a couple of month ago with a M.2 to 2'5 adapter, and I've put a Samsung 840 250GB stick on it, BUT (and that "but" is important here) as secondary drive in the IDE chain. Primary unit was a SD 2 2'5 adapter.

And the "but" is important because while HDToolBox recognized it, I could even partition it, it was not recognized after a reboot. After a lot of fiddling and headaches, and with the help of @Ami603 , we found that in HDToolBox you need not only to save geometry and partitions on the disk you are partitioning, you need also to save the state of the primary unit, even if you have not edited it. As soon as you save state of primary unit, secondary one is recognized. Don't ask me why, it doesn't make sense to me… I guess it will have something to do with the state of the chain itself, LUN or something like this, but that's not needed in, f.ex., PC IDE chains, you simply connect the disk correctly set as master and slave and that's all.

Saluditos,

Ferrán.

Last edited by Ferry on 10-Nov-2019 at 01:17 AM.

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@Ferry

Thats weird! Never had any issues with mine it's quite happy being the only drive in the system. I wonder if it is the translation circuitry the converts ide to SATA where the issue could be?

@smartroad

can you please check the speed of the drive in the latest SysInfo and post result here

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

@klx300r

Depending on partition between 1.13 and 1.25MB/S