Amiga 1000 C Ltd 33 Meg Hard Disk reviewed by Greg Ford The Amiga 1000 has an elegant, slim design that looks good, but does not allow enough room for the easy installation of internal Hard Disk drives. Fortunately, several third-party manufacturers have released external drives in the 20-40 Megabyte range. This review looks at the C Ltd 33 Meg Hard Disk. Hardware: The drive is finished in Amiga-beige and measures 6.25 x 4.25 x 13 inches. A pass through SCSI Host/Controller Board plugs onto the expansion port of the A1000, and provides for up to 7 additional drives to be daisy-chained onto the system. The Host/Controller is connected to the drive with a cable long enough to allow the drive to sit on either side of the computer. Auto-config is supported under KS/WB 1.2. The drive is externally powered from the mains, with the power switch being located on the rear panel. Difficult to get to, but out of the way of prying fingers!. There are two 50 pin SCSI connectors as well, one goes to the controller board at the computer, and the other allows daisy-chaining to additional drives. The standard of finish of the drive was a little disappointing. The high impact plastic case is poorly fitted, and the 50 pin SCSI connectors on the back of the drive do not have retaining clips or screws. This could allow the plug to work loose with potential dire consequences should the plug fall out while the drive is on! Internally, the drive is rather messy, with trailing wires, and a totally exposed power supply. The 240 volt power switch is exposed, and the (noisy) fan is mounted on a piece of tinplate that I swear was shaped with tin-snips!. The drive itself is an OKI and appears to be quite rugged and well built. The SCSI Host/Controller board is well finished, but has several protruding screw heads that are badly placed, and could mark the side of the computer if you are not careful at installation. Most of these criticisms are however, relatively minor, and the drive has proven to be reliable and pleasant to use over a period of several months. The controller card draws 350mw from the computers power supply. If you are running extra memory boards or peripherals, you should check that you will not exceed the Amiga's power supply limits (said to be only 1000mw, but seemingly unburstable). Software: The drive comes pre-formatted, and includes about 10 megabytes of Public Domain/Shareware software. This software includes demonstrations of BEST Business Management and Logistix. There are also numerous paint, font editing, terminal and utility programs. The Hard Disk Utilities directory contains software to allow you to park the heads, format the drive, and generally manage the drive efficiently. Many help files are provided, and the standard of documentation provided on the disk, and in the Instruction Manual is generally high. A Backup program is provided which is easy to use, and provides incremental and file backup, with an exclude option, printer logging, an options configuration log, data compression and speech synthesised floppy disk requests!!. The program is however, slow, and takes about 2 1/2 hours to back up the whole hard disk. A Workbench/Boot diskette is provided, with several startup-sequence files that you can customise for your own purposes. Documentation: The Instruction Manual is a 42 page A4 sized, corner stapled booklet, and is quite comprehensive, covering installation and setup in easy to follow steps, with technical descriptions and diagrams of the equipment, and sections covering adding additional drives, mountlists, formatting and trouble shooting. No index is provided, but the manual is small enough to be manageable without one. Performance: Many of the U.S based reviews of Amiga hard disks criticise the slowness of these drives compared to MS Dos machines. While this is generally true, it is partly the blame of AmigaDOS. This should be corrected in the soon to be released 1.3 version of the operating system. That's not to say that the C Ltd Drive is a slouch. It is significantly faster than floppies. Windows open almost immediately, and CLI commands are effectively instantaneous. The drive is very pleasant to use, and feels "snappy". The following timings were made: Floppy C Ltd Load DPaintII from Workbench to selection screen 15 6.5 Load Scribble! from Workbench 14.4 8.0 Load AmigaBasic from Workbench 11 5.4 And for the more technically minded: File Creations / sec 6 File Deletions / sec 13 Dir scans / sec 49 Seek / Reads / sec 52 Write a 8192 byte file 18145 bytes / sec Read a 8192 byte file 32557 bytes / sec (using DiskPerfA) Using the Drive: The drive appears on Workbench with an Icon that looks like the drive, and can be used like an ordinary floppy (or about 38 of them!). Mine has the volume name AM-33, which is C Ltd's model number. From CLI you can address the drive as DH0: At boot-time, the startup-sequence file on the floppy disk MOUNTs the drive, then executes a start file on the hard disk which then ASSIGNs all AmigaDos devices to DH0: so that it is not necessary to keep the boot floppy in the internal drive. All dos commands etc are subsequently taken from the hard disk, thus speeding up response time. The increased data transfer speed lets you load up all those useful utilities (like Anytime, Grabbit, Screenblanker etc) from the startup file on the hard disk without having to wait forever. Many of the popular software packages such as DPaint, Scribble!, Superbase, VIP Professional, Butcher, Audiomaster etc can be loaded directly onto the drive, although several need to be "deprotected" first, by a program such as Marauder. This is one of the few valid uses of such copy programs, so make sure that you only use them for floppy - hard disk transfers or backups. Some software requires a knowledge of CLI to install.. a good excuse to start learning!. Of course the best thing about a hard disk is the large amount of on-line storage available. You can condense that (ever growing) box of floppies down to a single drive, and everything is available immediately. Conclusion: The C Ltd hard Disk is a product that is nicer to use than the specifications would suggest. It is on the average only 3-5 times faster than floppies, but gives you convenience and large storage. Reliability appears to be good despite the low standard of finish. A phone call to the manufacturer in US was met with assurances that the new shipments of this product have been re-engineered to higher standards of finish. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ END OF HARDDRIVE.RVW ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~