--------------------------------- REVIEW: A590 PLUS HARD DISK DRIVE By John van der Brook --------------------------------- The new Amiga hard disk for the A500 has arrived -- the A590 Plus. And what a Plus it is! Fully compatible with the A500, both electronically and cosmetically, it plugs into the expansion bus located on the left side of the A500 and has nearly an identical profile. Because the A500 power supply is so limited, the A590 comes with its own power supply. On the surface, both power supplies for the A500 and A590 appear identical, but their jacks are different, thus preventing confusion. There is no provision for plugging the A500 and 1084 monitor into the A590 power supply, so there's only one switch to turn on when firing up the computer. This very minor limitation is perhaps the only complaint about an otherwise superlative addition to the Amiga 500 family. Unlike the original A590, the A590 Plus allows two megs of RAM to be added, in 512K, 1M or 2M chunks. It requires 120 nsec or faster RAM, so ensure your dealer orders accordingly. For most of us, installation of the RAM chips is a job best left to the authorized technician. Mating the A590 to the A500 is a bit tricky but should be well within the capability of most users. I wear bifocals, so I had no some difficulty combining sufficient light, the right viewing angle, and manipulating the ground plane to ensure successful mating. Beneath the expansion bus on the A500 is a strip of metallic foil used as a ground plane. There is a provided A590 clip which must first be inserted between the ground plane and the plastic case of the A500. The clip extends over the outside of the plastic case and depends upon friction, capacitive coupling, and sheer size for ground continuity. The A590 then must be slid into place, coupling the connectors and fitting around the newly installed clip. All this is to make sure the mated HD meets FCC RFI standards. Sound complicated? It's not for folks with normal vision, but for some of us, it can become a bit tricky. It took about 10 minutes, from reading the instructions to completing the installation. SUPERBLY How well does it work? Superbly. In fact, the A500/A590 combination is what the original A1000 should have been from the start. Four years ago I paid more than $2,000 for my A1000, with 512K RAM and 1084 monitor. Today, you can have 2.5 MB of RAM, the Amiga, monitor, and a 20MB hard disk for about the same price. It actually takes up less desk space than an A1000 comparably equipped, and surely outperforms the original A1000 in every respect. Should you wish to add peripherals, Commodore thoughtfully retained the SCSI port on the back of the A590. I cannot provide a definitive report on drive speed. A comparison was made with an A2000HD with a Rodime hard drive, which is fast but certainly no screamer. With both systems side by side, we rebooted both several times for comparisons. It's not scientific and has an error factor of + 1.5 seconds. The results of stop watch measurements were surprising. Performing a warm reboot with the 2000HD averaged 41 seconds. A similar warm reboot on the A590 took 29 seconds! I would conclude the A590 comes with a 28msec drive installed. The initial literature provided by Commodore indicated an 80msec drive, but that hardly seems likely. The A500, from the CLI, reports the formatted capacity of the A590 is 21MB, not 20MB, so you have the possibility of putting your entire Workbench on one partition of the drive, and still have nearly 20MB of storage for programs and data. The drive uses the PC ST-506 standard, so the A590 Plus also contains a SCSI device. One drawback which may affect some users: The Amiga bus does not pass through. You can use either the serial or parallel port, or the SCSI from the A590, but no further expansion is possible. On the other hand, Commodore has provided the internal capability for swapping out the hard drive. For example, one could upgrade to an 80MB Quantum SCSI drive operating at 19msec! ON PARTITIONING As shipped, the A590 Plus is partitioned as one hard drive. You may wish to further partition the drive. The instruction manual is well written and easy to follow. If you equip your A590 with one or two megs of RAM, then by all means further partition the drive. Each hard drive partition does consume RAM, so if you are limited to one meg of RAM total, three partitions will drop you to 760K of usable RAM. Why partition? For one thing, not all programs you may wish to copy to HD are well thought out. Attempting to install a copy of Works! Platinum, on hard disk resulted in guru meditations each time a program run was attempted. After a second installation, the program refused to run. The installation program added so many files to the HD, it was simpler to reformat the entire hard disk than to search for the offending file. After this experience, I partitioned the drive into Workbench, Programs, and Data, 1.7MB, 5.5MB, and 13MB respectively. Each new drive -- labeled DH0:, FD0:, and FD1: -- had to be formatted. It was a simple process. Then I was able to load programs into a hard disk, secure in the knowledge that if a program contains a faulty file, I only need reformat the Programs disk, not the entire hard disk. Incidentally, reformatting can be done using the standard CLI format command. Finally, how to best use the A590 or in fact, any hard drive. I know many people who keep all of their business data on HD. Some actually back up that data with tape or removable HDs or floppies. Unless you back up your data religiously, you are asking for a major disaster. Hard drives generally are free of defects and will give tens of thousands of trouble-free hours. The same is not true for software. As every Amiga user knows, visits from the guru or keyboard lockups can occur at the most inauspicious times. This is in part a penalty of multitasking and sloppy software development. There is plenty of faulty software out there which can create havoc with the operating system, given the right (or wrong) circumstances. HOME USER ADVICE Considering all of this, I give the following advice to all Amiga home users I meet: Use the hard drive for your program software and keep data in a separate partition or, better, on floppy disks. It's relatively painless to recopy your programs to the HD after reformatting the drive, but it's nearly impossible to reconstruct data. If you know what you are doing, you may be able to retrieve most of your data. If you do elect to partition part of the hard drive for data, then keep periodic backup copies on floppies to insure you lose a minimum of data in case of a massive crash. The A590 Plus, with 20MB of nominal hard drive memory, has the equivalent disk capacity of 23 floppy disks. You can store much more than 23 programs on your disk, however, because most programs come equipped with most of the Workbench, which is needed to run the program in a stand-alone application. By copying only the actual program, attendant files and associated icons to the Programs partition, you can store literally hundreds of programs and still have room for data. As often as not, as soon as you double-click the program's icon, you will get a requester to put the original program disk into any drive. This is not some nefarious copy protection scheme, but literally a case of misassignment. What you must do is check each program, and whenever a requester appears, determine what library or file is being requested, and insure there is a matching assign statement in the startup-sequence in the boot disk. You may also need to define additional paths for the operating system to check. BOTTOM LINE All in all, the A590 Plus is a long awaited and much needed addition to the Commodore Amiga lineup. For most users, the A500/A590 combo will prove more useful than an A500 with 1M RAM and a second floppy disk. The only question will be if first-time computer buyers can afford that outlay of cash. It is for certain, though, that smart comparison shoppers will find the combination unbeatable when considering price to performance. END