Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!oliveb!tymix!hobbes!pnelson
From: pnelson@hobbes.uucp (Phil Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Why BridgeBoards are so popular
Summary: BridgeBoard disks rely on MS-DOS
Message-ID: <3662@tymix.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jun 90 01:35:26 GMT
References: <4420@munnari.oz.au> <32431@auc.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@tymix.UUCP
Reply-To: pnelson@hobbes.UUCP (Phil Nelson)
Organization: BT Tymnet, Inc. / San Jose, CA
Lines: 35

In article <32431@auc.UUCP> rar@auc.UUCP (Rodney Ricks) writes:
>In article <4420@munnari.oz.au> ianr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Ian ROWLANDS) writes:
>>	After ringing some of the dealers around, I can now say why the XT
>>and AT bridgeboards are so popular.
>>...
>>The reason - it's the same price to put the HD on the bridgeboard as to get
>>a HD and controller for the Amiga. Don't know about anybody else, but this
>>seems crazy to me.
>
>Not all hard disks are the same.  What you would get for the Amiga would
>almost certainly be a SCSI controller and hard drive.  For the bridgeboard, the
>hard drives that they are talking about are the less expensive, but slower,
>ST506 hard drives.


Rodney is right, they are noticibly slower. I had one, and took it out after
installing a 2091 with Quantum SCSI disk. Another problem with using the
BridgeBoard disk for an Amigados partition, is that when anything goes wrong
with MS-DOS, you lose access to the Amiga stuff too. Now that Microsoft has
a zero bugs policy, maybe you don't need to worry about this possibility :-)
I had a lot of problems with it, though. A lot depends on what you run on
the the BridgeBoard.

I just remembered another problem, the Amiga wants to access the disk async
with MS-DOS activity, this was a big problem on my 2088 Bridgeboard, which
lost characters on comm transfers, got errors on floppy transfers, etc. every
time an access on the AmigaDOS partition occured at the wrong time. Things
might not be so bad with the 2286.

It's probably not as bad as I made it sound, I lived with it for a long time,
but it is not a robust setup, in my opinion.
Phil Nelson . uunet!pyramid!oliveb!tymix!hobbes!pnelson . Voice:408-922-7508

	He who winks the eye causes trouble,
            but he who boldly reproves makes peace.     -Proverbs 10:10