The scsi controller will probably use less cpu. The one I have has dma and whatnot. It’s pretty snappy.

But that drive may its self be slow as bawls.

I might suggest a third option.

2.5” ide ssd? Pio may make it slow, but at least the processor won’t be waiting for the drive to return data haha!

There is also scsi to sd. But idk if that works on 2.5”

What I did on my gateway 2000 was use the best scsi card I could find with an adapter to the best 80 pin scsi hdd I could find. Turned out pretty good. Nice and fast. 15k rpm. It is a 3.5” though.

I’ve been meaning to benchmark my gateway scsi setup against a 44 pin ssd but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-05, 01:19:

The scsi controller will probably use less cpu. The one I have has dma and whatnot. It’s pretty snappy. […]
Show full quote

The scsi controller will probably use less cpu. The one I have has dma and whatnot. It’s pretty snappy.

But that drive may its self be slow as bawls.

I might suggest a third option.

2.5” ide ssd? Pio may make it slow, but at least the processor won’t be waiting for the drive to return data haha!

There is also scsi to sd. But idk if that works on 2.5”

What I did on my gateway 2000 was use the best scsi card I could find with an adapter to the best 80 pin scsi hdd I could find. Turned out pretty good. Nice and fast. 15k rpm. It is a 3.5” though.

I’ve been meaning to benchmark my gateway scsi setup against a 44 pin ssd but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Thanks for the reply. Actually I would already have a convenient and economical system which is Ide-> compact flash, which is already considerably faster than the two discs considered in the first post. But I would like to stay in the correct period and I really like the noise of hard disks, especially the 2.5 ”ones where the rotation noise is very low. So in reality the question remains ...

In that case, go scsi and get a better drive? is my vote. Maybe see about the biggest one they made for 2.5"? newer you go the better the speed/access time will usually be. you can always partition it to a small drive for nostalgia. Even could use a partition program to put it on the outside of the platter for higher speed read/write.

RaSCSI (fork) seems to support the A1200..

https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Compatibility

Because of period-correctness.. Compact Flash cards did exist in the 1990s.
Sure, at smaller capacity (~4 MB+), but they did exist.
They were related to these PCMCIA memory cards, I remember.

Then, there are Microdrives. Cute and fascinating, but they're not meant to continously spin.

2,5" IDE SSDs can be built with mSATA SSD sticks and those cheap 2,5" IDE SSD enclosures (dogfish etc).
They do contain an ordinary SATA-IDE converter board, essentially.
mSATA can work exactly like SATA on an electrical level.

If you're deciding to use a real 2,5" HDD, please make sure the breathing hole isn't covered.
Using a vibration damper (like a rubber sleeve/a pair of brackets for shock absorbtion) is also a good idea.
Smarter HDDs tend to slow down if they notice that they vibrate too much (they're using piezo technology and can sense all kind of things;
modern HDDs can act as microphones, even).

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-05, 03:31:

In that case, go scsi and get a better drive? is my vote. Maybe see about the biggest one they made for 2.5"? newer you go the better the speed/access time will usually be. you can always partition it to a small drive for nostalgia. Even could use a partition program to put it on the outside of the platter for higher speed read/write.

The center of my question is this.
There is a big age difference between the old scsi drive and the new ide.

https://ardent-tool.com/IBM_HD/dhas_spf.pdf
This is the scsi pdf spec. For what i know there are only one series of drive, can the bus ide vs scsi fill the tecnological gap between a 3800rpm scsi drive and a modern 7200rpm ide drive??? seek time and chache also is much better on the ide drive.

I don't know much about the Amiga 1200, so please excuse my ignorance..

But I think it also depends on what the IDE interface on the motherboard is capable of.

On the PC platform, we have the problem that, say, a 286 with an IDE port can technically talk to any modern IDE drive.
- *If* the BIOS can handle the HDD (size, ATA/WD1003 language etc)..

However, even if it really can, some problems remain:
- PIO 0 transfer, because the 286 BIOS doesn't know of any higher PIO levels
- DMA is not used because of DOS not supporting it out-of-box (FreeDOS has drivers?)
- DMA would be limited to DMA or Multi-Word DMA - DMA on ISA is slow in terms of throughput
- Ultra DMA not possible, because PCI with Bus Mastering would be needed. Or some similar bus type

Now, it depends on how the Amiga relates to this.
If the Amiga is software or hardware-wise capable of supporting the IDE drive's features,
it would be neat.

Otherwise, and older SCSI controller/HDD might be quicker or less CPU intensive, despite the lower throughput in KB/s or MB/s.

Edit: The Power PC Macintosh might be comparable to the Amiga, maybe.
It started with SCSI drives, which were wuick and well supported.
But then, roughly with the advent of the Power Mac G3 Blue/White, buggy/slow IDE controllers appeared.
The on-board IDE on the rev.1 motherboard was very buggy, so people used the ATAPI port (CD-ROM controller) for newer HDDs.
Or, whenever possible, installed SCSI controller cards (PCI) with MacOS support and used SCSI HDDs.
(The rev.2 motherboard wasn't all that great, either, imho. Still slower than ATAPI here.)

Edit: Typos fixed.

So, is close to impossible to know without test all directly.... i stay with the more recent and cheeper IDE. tnks

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789.
Forget scsi if all you consider is 2.5 apple drive.
1 drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one.
2 30 year old 2.5 scsi drive will quickly die, that is if it even works in the first place.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-05, 11:53:

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789. […]
Show full quote

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789.
Forget scsi if all you consider is 2.5 apple drive.
1 drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one.
2 30 year old 2.5 scsi drive will quickly die, that is if it even works in the first place.

the last part is what i have looking for... tnks a lot

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-10-05, 12:01:

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-05, 11:53:

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789. […]
Show full quote

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789.
Forget scsi if all you consider is 2.5 apple drive.
1 drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one.
2 30 year old 2.5 scsi drive will quickly die, that is if it even works in the first place.

the last part is what i have looking for... tnks a lot

just to clarify: _all_ drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one. I didnt mean just scsi or just this one 2.5 inch scsi model.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-05, 13:01:

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-10-05, 12:01:

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-05, 11:53:

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789. […]
Show full quote

amiga ide = 1-2MB/s. The best you can do is CF with either ide or pcmcia converter https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=59789.
Forget scsi if all you consider is 2.5 apple drive.
1 drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one.
2 30 year old 2.5 scsi drive will quickly die, that is if it even works in the first place.

the last part is what i have looking for... tnks a lot

just to clarify: _all_ drive operations are pants slow even with fastest amiga turbo, we are talking watching drawer icons appear one by one. I didnt mean just scsi or just this one 2.5 inch scsi model.

3.1 with Blizzard 1230IV and IDE 7200rpm, actually, is absolutely NON slow.

I would get the 7200rpm IDE drive, should be fast enough and you can easily find cheap replacements if it fails.

SCSI is cool, but ridiculously overpriced and with used drives you never know how much abuse they have endured.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-05, 01:19:

The scsi controller will probably use less cpu. The one I have has dma and whatnot. It’s pretty snappy. […]
Show full quote

The scsi controller will probably use less cpu. The one I have has dma and whatnot. It’s pretty snappy.

But that drive may its self be slow as bawls.

I might suggest a third option.

2.5” ide ssd? Pio may make it slow, but at least the processor won’t be waiting for the drive to return data haha!

There is also scsi to sd. But idk if that works on 2.5”

What I did on my gateway 2000 was use the best scsi card I could find with an adapter to the best 80 pin scsi hdd I could find. Turned out pretty good. Nice and fast. 15k rpm. It is a 3.5” though.

I’ve been meaning to benchmark my gateway scsi setup against a 44 pin ssd but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

You could try looking into the aec-7722 conversion, add a ata2sata adapter and an ssd and do a benchmark of that setup 😁

The scsi2sd v6 card should be the fastest one there is, unfortunately it isn't available in 2"5 format. though v5.5 for powerbooks is.

I don't know of any rascsi or other scsi emulators which are available in 2"5 format.
Would be nice to have a few more options for my udb which actually support fast synchronous scsi.

I don't know what the max of the scsi bus for the a1200 is.