articles.erkan.se

There used to be a time when hard drives where a luxury not standard equipment not only in the Amiga world but also in the MS-DOS world. Standard equipment was one floppy drive, almost luxury but more obtainable from a financial point of view was a second floppy drive. One floppy drive held the operating system in one floppy disc, the other drive held the application you wanted to run from a second floppy disc.

Buying a hard drive for your Amiga used to be a huge investment. Not only did you buy the hard drive, you also needed to buy the controller for it since some Amiga models did not come with a HD controller built in. You could easily pay more for a hard drive controller and a hard drive than for the Amiga 500, if you wanted extra memory added in the controller price could easily hit the stratosphere.

At the end of the lifespan of the A500 some IDE hard drive controllers where released. IDE is not as good as SCSI is (or was) but it is cheaper and works well for most users, these hard drives where a bit cheaper to buy than a SCSI controller and SCSI eventually fell in popularity with mainstream Amiga owners.

Alfapower 500 is an excellent hard drive controller for the Amiga 500 and A500+. Since it is using IDE units is possible to run a Compact Flash card as a hard drive instead with an IDE to Compact Flash adapter easily found on the net right now. I was kinda surprised to find booth a 40-pin header for 3.5 drives and a 44-pin header for notebook drives (same as A600 and A1200). There should be space inside it to run dual 2.5 inch hard drives or a single 3.5 inch and a single 2.5 inch drive internally, but why would you? Compact Flash price is dropping every day and the awesome speedup, silent operation and low watt consumption of CF-cards makes it a winner anytime over regular old school IDE hard drives.

Another cool thing with the unit is the slot on the backside that is open for a 40-pin IDE cable to pass through letting the user hook up an IDE CD-rom easily to his A500.

Most Amiga hard drive controllers have some way of expanding memory and so does the Alfapower 500. There are actually two versions of this controller around, the older one supports ZIP-memory, hard to find these days. The newer version supports 72-pin memory, relatively easy to find these days. Booth versions can be expanded to 8 MB.

Alfa Data provided the case of the controller with two switches, one lets you turn off the hard drive, it will still spin up like its operational but it will be invincible to the system. The other switch lets the user turn off the extra memory. Some software (mostly games) had problems running with an expanded Amiga, turning off hard drive could mean a running game or not.

All in all this is a great add on to any Amiga 500 and will add more enjoyment to it eliminating painful floppy loading and read write errors from old disks kept in storage for years.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Amiga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.