Amiga HD additions

[toomanymikes]

Hi, im new to this forum so I need some catch up advice from regulars. I have been reading a few messages and I was wondering what advantages installing a hard drive to the Amiga has? Is this a difficult operation or can any old fool with a screwdriver (me) do it?

[AlexJ]

Amongst the main advantages are you can have a customised Workbench with no concern about the limited space of the floppy disk, and you can install some multi-disk games onto it so you don't need to swap disks during play.

[Sharingan]

You'll never want to go back to Workbench-on-floppy-disk once you've tried a HD-installed version. It's a night and day difference.

As for installing a HD, it kind of depends on which model Amiga you have. If it's an A600 or A1200, they do have an internal 44-pin ATA interface that supports a 2.5 inch drive. The problem is finding an actual drive that still works.

I've opened up my Amigas quite a few times, and it's not very complicated at all if you've also done some PC installations - same principle.

[toomanymikes]

Really? I might look into it then - are the drives really that hard to find or is there modern drives that are compatable?

[Sharingan]

Modern drives would likely blow the crap out of a standard A600/A1200's power supply - I think they're only rated at 20-something Watts

I'm pretty sure you could still find a compatible drive somewhere. Maybe Harrison can help you out - he's the resident Amiga guru around here.

[Submeg]

And if not, an SD card or equivalent idea could be used...

[Harrison]

The thing to take into account on the older Amigas is that they have an HD limitation of 4GB. You can stick a larger HD into them but they won't (as standard) be able to see or use more than the first 4GB.

But you can get third party file systems to then be able to use the rest of a larger disk. Or even better, with an Amiga A1200 if you upgraded to Workbench 3.9 it can use larger HDs as standard.

If you are thinking about adding an HD to an A1200 then the UK store Amiga Kit have lots of products you may be interested in.

Here is a 40GB HD for the A1200 with WB 3.5 pre-installed.

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=175

They also have reconditioned A1200's if you don't currently have one and were interested in getting one.

[Demon Cleaner]

I recently bought a reconditioned A1200 from AmigaKit, and I have to say, it's pretty good, did not look very used, as they also refurbish them. Did get it with a 260MB HDD.

[Stephen Coates]

The thing to take into account on the older Amigas is that they have an HD limitation of 4GB. You can stick a larger HD into them but they won't (as standard) be able to see or use more than the first 4GB.

Am I right in thinking that a disk above 4GB can be partitioned into more than one 4GB partitions?

[Harrison]

I'm unsure about this as I've only used HDs up to 2GB on size on an Amiga. I was led to believe at the time that 4GB was the total size of HD they could access over all partitions, but I could be wrong. Does anyone know?