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From: tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Recommendations for A1000 SCSI+RAM
Message-ID: <11260008@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 2 May 91 15:19:12 GMT
References: <18878@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 33

RE: A-1000 RAM/Hard drive expansion

I'm using a Starboard II and StarDrive.  Seems to work fine.  The drive
interface can be a bit slow if you don't invoke 'fastmode', but with it
invoked, I believe the read rates are over 100kbytes/sec, which is fast
enough that it doesn't get in my way.

StarBoards autoconfigure, but booting still requires a floppy.  I don't
think you will get away from that on a stock A-1000.  Of course you can
boot from RAD: if you are doing a warm reboot, but cold boots start with
the floppy.

I had a large quantity of ram chips a while back, many of which I put
into StarBoards, so I got an opportunity to check quite a few of them.
I found them to generally be well-built, and out of over ten of them,
had no StarBoard-related failures.  However, they do seem to load the
A-1000's bus pretty heavily, and I found that most A-1000's can't stand
two of them at once.  My A-1000 would take one StarBoard, or one StarBoard
and one 'BareBoards' (no longer in business??), which has very light bus
loading, if I put a bus terminator on it.  But I never got two StarBoards
working on it.  On a few other A-1000's I've seen, even one StarBoard had
trouble without the bus terminator.  I wouldn't let that discourage you,
though:  I've had my Starboard going pretty much continuously for three
years now without a hitch, and I'm sure I would have heard from some of
the customers for the others I put together if there had been serious
problems with theirs.

BTW, pardon the semi-commercialism, but I still have a few megs of the
chips; I'll beat 'any advertised price' and guarantee them to work (if
not abused).

Tom Bruhns
tomb@hplsla.hp.com