Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: s.k.khan@bradford.ac.uk (Saleem Khan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Western Digital Caviar hard disk Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 30 May 1994 22:00:04 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 204 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2sdnl4$1a0@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: s.k.khan@bradford.ac.uk (Saleem Khan) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, hard disk, IDE, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Western Digital Caviar hard disk BRIEF DESCRIPTION An 340-megabyte, 3.5-inch, IDE hard disk for the Amiga 1200, Amiga 600, or any Amiga with an IDE controller. COMPANY INFORMATION Sorry, but I purchased the hard drive as part of a package, so I don't know any supplier information. If anyone knows the information, please send it to amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu. LIST PRICE Again, I don't know, since I bought it with a computer. I think around $600 (US) might be right. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An IDE hard disk drive controller is required. Every disk partition requires 30K of RAM. If you have a base model Amiga, such as a 1 MB Amiga 600, you may want to get a RAM expansion. CPU speed also plays its part here. Hard disk operations (read, write) are faster if you have an accelerated CPU and some Fast RAM. I have also installed DiskExpander (which itself needs RAM to compress/decompress the data). SOFTWARE None required. If you would like to partition the hard disk, then you need some "prepping" software. There are freely distributable programs on the Aminet ftp site for doing this. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1200 series, 2MB Chip RAM, 4MB Fast RAM. Internal 880K floppy drive. External high density floppy drive. Kickstart 39.106 (3.0), Workbench 40.35 (3.1). REVIEW If you own an Amiga without a hard disk, you ain't lived! ;) Honestly, though, the difference between a floppy based system and a hard disk based system is immense! Ever since I sold my Amiga 500, I've wanted more power. The A1200 was the obvious, affordable choice; and coupled with 6 megabytes of RAM and a hard disk, I thought it would be a killer product! Well, I took the plunge and bought a system, and it has brought me nothing but pleasure. I think you don't know what the Amiga can do until you have a fairly fast machine (68020 or better), lots of memory, and a large hard disk... or at least that's what I've found. :) Being the curious type, I have tested the hard disk performance just to know how it is compared to the other hard disks available. I was pleasantly surprised to learn this is a very fast hard disk indeed! Just to show that I am not cheating, I have used two programs to test the hard disk, and both report similar results. The drive was tested with two different benchmark programs -- SysInfo version 3 and SPSTrans version 1.01 -- before and after I got my Fast RAM. The results are tabulated below. Program With Fast (Megs/Second) Without Fast (Megs/Second) ========================================================================== SysInfo 1.78 Megabytes per second 1.41 Megabytes per Second SPSTrans 1.76 Megabytes per second 1.39 Megabytes per Second DOCUMENTATION None. Now the specifications... *YUMMY* >8) Device Size: 340961280 bytes Device Name: WDC AC234H Heads : 12 Sectors : 55 Cylinders : 1010 Seek time : less than 15ms LIKES AND DISLIKES What do I like about this hard disk? Everything! It does what it is supposed to do very well. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Although I have friends with A1200 computers and hard disks, they don't have Fast RAM. Therefore, all the details next are for a basic A1200 (my Fast RAM removed). I know these figures, as I had to sort the machines for my friends because I know how to do it and they don't! >8) Hard disk Data Transfer rate /sec ======================================== This hard disk 1.4Megs Conner 60 meg 600K Quantum 900K BUGS None found. The drives mentioned above seem to have problems. One of them seems to spin up, but the "Insert Kickstart" 3.0 animation is shown. A warm reset cures this; but if it was my machine, I would be very annoyed. ;) One thing to note is that HDToolBox uses some very strange MASK number as a default value. Therefore, when you re-partition the drive, you must enter the correct one(s). The values at present are: Mask : 0x7ffffffc Max Transfer : 0x1fe00 These values seem to work fine. VENDOR SUPPORT Never returned it! >8) WARRANTY One year warranty on the computer provided by CBM itself, and one year on the drive by Western Digital. CONCLUSIONS If you've been thinking of getting a large capacity hard disk, then this would be a nice choice. Also, if you plan to buy a hard disk again, this is a good choice. It may seem like a lot of disk space, but I've filled about 80% of it and I'm still going strong.;) (Thats if I was to uncompress the data that is already compressed.) If you think it's still too much here the result from the AmigaDos INFO command: Mounted disks: Unit Size Used Free Full Errs Status Name DH1: 200M 199596 210922 49% 0 Read/Write HardDisk Amax: 7862K 27 16471 0% 0 Read/Write Emptyhd OTHER: 116M 207689 30569 87% 0 Read/Write Other The partition "SYS:" is compressed using the xpkNUKE compression library. The information for this partition is: DiskExpander Statistics v2.110 by Markus Bader (C) 1993 Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe Listing of path 'sys:': Original Packed PackRate Library Name -------- -------- -------- ---------- ------------- [deleted file names to save space] -------- -------- -------- ---------- ------------- 137496731 94852534 31.0% 7923 files For a final result, I give this hard disk five stars out of five. It works just like it should, and it is very good compared to other hard disks that work on the A1200. COPYRIGHT NOTICE You may do with this review as you want as long as you don't claim to have written it. :) I also take no responsibility for the information contained in this document which is correct as far as I know at this present time. Copyright 1994 Saleem Khan (Duggy). All rights reserved. (Congrats Duster on your new baby, and you JimBeam) --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews