--- Julian Richardson <JRichardson_at_softwright.co.uk> wrote:
> Do all 1200's come with built in IDE hard drive controllers - or did
> commodore do things on the cheap and only add controllers for machines
> shipped with drives (I'm assuming the controller lives on the main board
> itself)?
AFAIK, yes. The A600 was available with and without drives and ISTR the
ROMs were different, but I've owned just about every other model than that
and can't comment from personal experience.
> Will the 1200 accept any size (capacity) drive? Or wasn't the OS / ROM code
> hard-drive aware and cheated by making the drive look like a big floppy (I'm
> sure there were systems which did this, but I can't remember if the amiga
> was one of them)?
There are no inbuilt _intentional_ (i.e., marketing driven) size limitations
beyond the usual sorts of things one gets trying to bolt a drive onto a ten-
year-old system that never conceived of a monsterous storage device. I think
there is a general 4Gb limit on disks, SCSI or IDE. I know there is an issue
with the FFS and number of blocks in the device. I have personally never put
anything over 4Gb on an Amiga, but have had lots of luck with 20Mb on up to
1Gb.
> Presumably 2.5 drives are the preferred method - but there's nothing to stop
> 3.5" IDE drives being used with a suitable adpator (OK that's actually an
> IDe question - I think it's just the connectors that differ between them
> though, right?)
The 2.5" connector provides power as well as data. If you address that issue,
yes, you can use an adapter to hook a 3.5" device (or 5.25", like a CD-ROM)
to your A1200.
> On the hardware side of things, someone said the 1200's IDE controller is
> basically unbuffered I/O straight to the CPU (which sounds possible
> certainly with IDE) and so it's real easy to toast things - is that true?
It's true. In general, IDE tends to be a fairly raw interface, although as
machines have evolved, it's not as raw as back in the 386 days.
> What are the options of networking a '1200 (ideally TCP/IP stack on the
> Amiga, using SLIP or something to a Unix box maybe? Are there things around
> that allow this, with NFS mounting of drives for data copying?)
Since I've never owned as 1200, I can't speak to the myriad of hardware
options, but there are TCP/IP stacks for AmigaDOS and clients such as
NFS clients, Web Browsers, Samba servers. If you want the storage on the
UNIX box to be accessible by the Amiga, NFS is a good way to go. If you
want the other way around, Samba fits the bill. I do not know if there is
a freeware implementation of NFS Server for AmigaDOS (there was at least
one commercial one)
-ethan
=====
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Received on Fri Mar 30 2001 - 13:19:20 BST