by Arakis of Brain Wave
HARDWARE TEST : The COMMODORE A590 HARD DRIVE+
I know this hard drive is now available for a quite long time but this article was written a couple of months ago.Moreoer i think it is still worth reading it because there is some facts you may not know about this great piece of hardware...the Hard drive A590 from COMMODORE ! We are the only group in France which have an hard drive.It is A.Ch, our coder which bought one of the first A590. Ok...Hard drives are not for lamers ! Interest of HD become great only when you are programming or doing every kind of developing on amiga...(Graphics, sculpt work...).
It is a 20Mb HD with an access time of about 80ns.SCSI format allow you to connect seven other HD ! (a test was made with a 300Mb disk !).Besides you have a direct autoboot with FFS partition (Kick1.3, 1.4).However the manual provided with the HD is short, the utilities are quite good...so you don't need the mount command.Well the price of this A590 is a bit higher....Why? Simply because you have the possibility to add 2mb of RAM...This mean if you want to extend your amiga memory, it may be a real good bairgain. Let's think a bit: 512K+512K (A501) +2Mb (in the A590)...we get a total of 3mb of RAM in your Amiga 500...cool, eh? On the other hand you have the Skyline 30Mb with a self-headparkage and a 65ns access time...Just imagine, seka3.2 loaded in...one second ! And the price of the SKyline HD is cheaper... But we have chosen the Commodore one !
Now let's talk a bit of the environment...you switch on your amiga, the Harddrive immediatly start loading shell, #ram: (clips, t...) and of course virus killer (Kill'em All 2.22 (Very efficient!), clock... Then you have the possibility to load EVERYTHING YOU WANT at EVERY MOMENT ! The multitask context take is real dimension with the harddrive ! The problem is the need of memory !...you are working with seka..Oh! you need DpaintIII? ok...just type in your shell "dp" and 3 or 4 seconds later you can use it ! ...Really cool ! Hey soundtracker freaks, imagine 500 instruments available in one directory (!?) loaded IMMEDIATLY...It is so fast you have not the time to realize that an instruments is loaded.An average music (100K) is loaded in 3seconds (MODULES).
Many guyz are saying that you have big problems with virus when you have an HD...this guyz are only lamers...if you are not too stupid, you will easily avoid the virus problem !
(thanks to A.Ch/BRAIN WAVE who made this article possible!)
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #4" by Brainstorm 1990.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in april of 1990.
Go back to articlelist |
