A˜          „My fights with Conner



ƒ[Emer/Fire]

„   Lately,  I've  decided  to buy some
„good HD.‚ So I went to a Cracow market,
where   I  saw,  quite  cheap,  Conner
CFS850A  of capacity (like the name of
this  model says) 850MB. But it's just
a  Conners commercial grapple, applies
by  other  firms,  too, for example by
renowned  Western Digital. That's why,
because  they  took  1MB  as 1 million
bytes,  what  is, of course, bullshit.
In  fact, 1MB=1024 KB, 1KB=1024 bytes,
so  1MB=1048576 bytes. That's why disk
has  capacity  810MB.  But  with  such
large  capacity  we  can not complain,
this isn't miserable 40MB :-)

—   So, let's begin our article...
   For  connecting  3.5 inch hard-disk
to  IDE/AT-Bus  controller,  which  is
installed  inside  our  Amiga 1200, we





need  a proper "interface". We can buy
it in Elsat with software helpful with
formatting  disk. But interface itself
has  bad  fault,  because  using it is
connected  with removing steel screen,
what  is  not  good  for removing warm
from   inside   of   computer.   Other
possibility    is   buying   interface
mounted on a tape itself. In this case
h-disk  can  be easily mounted without
throwing out the screen.

   After  I  had  connected  h-disk, I
divided it to partitions, formatted it
and  installed  system. Everything was
O.K.  until  resetting computer. Since
then  my Amiga has not seen Conner. So
I  reseted computer and I began think,
what  is  the reason of such behavior.
In  the mean time I call to Apacz/Fire
&    blabla    (Hi    Apacz!),    but,
unfortunately,   he  didn't  know  the
answer,  too.  After another switching
Amiga on, disk became unwind and after
a  while,  on the screen I had WBench.
What  is  the  reason,  that  disk "is
seen"  by  the  system after switching
Amiga  on,  but  after  reset  is not?
First  I  thought,  my disk is damage,
which  was  not  a big problem for me,
because  I've had a year guarantee, in
spite  of  buying  disk on the market.
But I didn't want to go back to Cracow
and quarrel with seller about changing
my  disk.  So  I decided to read about
hard  disk  in  Amiga  magazine, but I
found    nothing.   Accidentally,   in
article  about  ProModule device, I've
found  information  about  my problem.
Everything  goes to cutting first (the
red one) wire from the tape connecting
disk  with  controller. I did it on my
own  risk,  and system started without
any  problems.  I haven't any troubles
with  h-disk  (with  free  space on it
specially)   since   then   (about   3
months).

   Everyone,  who  don't want to cut a
wire  from  the  tape, and has similar
problems,  can  use  a  ƒRainer  Hess‚'s
program„  A_1200HDPatch‚.  Putting it in
WBStartup    remove    all   problems.
Description  of  this  program  is  in
Amiga magazine 12/95, page 10.

„   Let's sum all up.
   Conner   CFS850A   has  quite  good
parameters. Data transfer: 1.4MB/s. My
previous  HD  -  WD Caviar 170 MB has,
about,  600KB/s. Of course, the newest
h-disks,  third  generation,  has very
quick transfer, approaching to 2.5MB/s
(that  is  almost  everything what you
can  get from AT-BUS), but their price
is a bit higher than Conner's h-disks.
Model CFS850A is quiet and low current
levy  (450mA  on  5V & 215mA on 12V) -
Amiga can afford on such charge. There
is  no  need  to  reset computer after
switching  it  on,  too,  because disk
fast unwinds.
   There  is  (only)  one fault. It is
reset  problem,  but you can see it is
easily to repair.

   Personally, I'm very satisfied with
Conner CFS850A had I think that others
user can not complain.
˜   ƒ    Emer/Fire