Amiga 1200 CF card

[David Baldwin]

Hi i have just upgraded my Amiga 1200 with a 4 gig CF card and Workbench 3.1 Pre installed from the supplyer

must say its Fast and Quiet No video from this new upgrade sorry.

[Nebulon]

Were there any tricks to installing it or getting it to run?

 

Did it ask for a driver or did Workbench's HD Toolbox just recognize it as a drive?

[carlsson]

Using the CF to IDE adapter, the card is detected as a hard drive without any other preparation. I seem to recall to have used another program than HD Toolbox though, one that had more options. Obviously you need to partition it first and format with suitable file system. That is different from when you add a CF card externally through a CF to PCMCIA adapter, then you can include FAT95 file system on top of the CF device handler in order to read and write files on a FAT formatted CF card, which though won't be a boot device.

[David Baldwin]

All i did was cut a floppy disk sticker to size to keep the cf card off the steal and add some cardbourd and stick than down then lay the cf card adater

on that stick that down with the cf card paper floppy sticker to the tin chassie. I ask to add 4 partitions he did and he installed wb3.1

i found the the 44 pin cable was a bit hard to push in so i used the old 44 pin cable saved bracking pins as it was a bit stiff. I don't know

how the SD cards work if thay are faster or slower.

[David Baldwin]

The video

 

[carlsson]

IIRC, IDE and CF have 1:1 matching of signals so the adapter is rather simple. A SD card involves more translation of data, which means more expensive adapters. I doubt you get any speed gain, in particular as CF also come in different speed classes.

 

The 2.5" IDE to CF adapters exist in several flavours. Most common are those with a male 44 pin header meaning you need a cable between the adapter and the motherboard. Though there are adapters with a female 44 pin header, which may fit directly to the motherboard without any cable inbetween. YMMV depending on other internal expansions, and it is not certain it is a better solution to skip a short bit of cable. I've implemented both in the two Amiga 1200's and one Amiga 600 that I've installed a "HDD" in modern years. Oddly enough though, in my own 1200 that I've kept, I still have a mechanical drive.

[David Baldwin]

yes ill keep my old drive for backup as i dont know how long the cf card will last.

[carlsson]

I've read figures of 1000 - 100,000 write cycles per memory cell on flash based memory. That is if you rewrite the same cell over and over. Reading supposedly won't shorten the life span. Then there is the long term storage aspect, if flash memory retains its memory for years, decades etc with or without powering it on now and then.