Phoenix Hard Disk  



                                 by Ken Simpson


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   Hard disk drives are a dime a dozen. With each passing week we see the
  prices drop and more and more speed was offered and delivered. Just a
  couple of years ago, the "normal" hard drive for an Amiga was a 20M 65 msec
  half height 5.25" drive. It would not autoboot and it used a kludge of an
  interface via the expansion port hooked up to the ST-506 that was required
  for the hard drive. The drive had to be installed (a procedure requiring
  not a bit of courage and expertise) and often formatted as well (requiring
  some time and patience). This was how Amiga hard drives started and all
  this for well over a thousand dollars.

   Thankfully many things have changed since those dark ages. So much so
  that today you a faced with an abundance of hard drives, interfaces and
  packages. Therefore you need to know what each package offers that is
  different from the others.

   A couple of weeks ago I received a large parcel from Phoenix
  Microtechnologies in Adelaide. My immediate thought was that they had sent
  me a monster. I have an old ST-506 style hard drive that is roughly 1/3
  the size of my Amiga 1000 computer. And it sounds like a small jet taking
  off when it spins up and the fan starts. When I had opened the box, I was
  very pleased to find that most of it was the necessary padding and
  packaging for a sensitive device to be transported.

   The drive itself was a very neat package. About the same size as one of
  the enhanced unidrives (ie about 21cm long, 13cm wide and 4 cm high).
  Finished tastefully in the same shade as an Amiga 500 the case was made of
  metal and had a Phoenix Logo and two LEDs on the front - a green power and
  an orange activity LED. Installing the drive was simplicity itself. There
  were two leads to connect. One power lead that connected directly to the
  disk drive port, with a pass through for your external drives, and a
  standard 25 way SCSI connector that plugged directly on to the SCSI
  extension for my Phoenix board.

   Bliss

   Having done that I powered up, and had a look at the supplied disk. Thank
  heavens that the days of mucking about with mountlists are gone. I started
  up Commodore's HDToolbox, followed the directions that Jonathon Potter had
  written out and rebooted. Voila! I had a 52 MB Quantum Hard Disk now
  accessible to my system. For what it is worth, the disk icon was nice, but
  52 MB of extra hard disk space was sheer bliss. There is an old adage that
  says "No matter how big or fast... you always need bigger and faster".
  It was very nice to have the extra storage in addition to my 80 MB quantum.

   No Fuss

   From this point on, it behaved simply and without any fuss at all. It was
  there, it was reliable, and it was faster than my floppies. And that's
  what you want from a hard disk. Its performance was not stunning, but
  that is to be expected as the performance of the Phoenix SCSI interface is
  not great. I am sure that if you connected it to a GVP or a SCRAM or
  similar that the Quantum would fly, as the 11ms average access time would
  suggest. But even so, it was plenty fast enough for most of the things
  that I do day to day with my Amiga.

   My one concern is that the A500 might not have the power capabilities to
  run a hard drive as well as the computer. The A500 has a notoriously bad
  power supply and you may well be fortunate enough to have one that can
  cope, but I suggest that if you have not done so, you should seriously
  consider upgrading your power supply. The A1000 etc will cope with no
  difficulty at all.

   Traps

   The traps for young players are only two that I can think of. If you have
  a Phoenix SCSI interface with a drive activity light that replaces your
  power LED then this LED goes green when the SCSI interface is active. That
  is, for a little while I thought that data was being written to both my
  hard disks when I was accessing the Phoenix hard drive. Whenever the SCSI
  interface was active the LED changed colour - for either drive. But the
  activity light on the front of the Phoenix drive only activated when it
  was accessed. A little confusing but you soon get used to it.

   Trap two is not really a trap due to Phoenix, but nevertheless it caused
  me a few minutes frustration. When you use HDToolBox to write a rigid disk
  block, it writes it to the hard drive that it boots from. The information
  about the presence or absence and size etc of other drives is all stored
  on the RDB of the boot drive. This means that when I removed the Phoenix
  Drive, when I started up or rebooted, the SCSI interface had to time out
  (about 30s) before the boot procedure would continue. This was very
  frustrating until I realised that I could speed the process up by pressing
  the left mouse button after the initial disk activity. So it's not a
  Phoenix problem, but a limitation of the RDB system.

   My impression is that this is a solid, well-designed unit. It worked
  flawlessly every time and was a breeze to install. In the past I have
  great technical support from Phoenix so I am sure that this aspect of the
  service will be of top class. A great hard drive at a good price.



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