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From: sandra@utah-cs.UUCP (Sandra J Loosemore)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Hard disk
Message-ID: <3902@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Aug-86 21:49:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3902
Posted: Fri Aug 22 21:49:25 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Aug-86 00:00:26 EDT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 34
Keywords: fast but noisy

Well, I finally broke down and got an Atari hard disk for my ST.  The good 
news is that it's fast and has lots of room.  Programs that take 20-30 seconds
to load from a floppy load in a second or two from the hard disk, so there's
no more sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to read the
files.

The bad news is that the disk is very noisy.  I didn't notice it so much
when playing with the demo machine at my dealer's, perhaps because there
was more background noise there.  It's loud enough to be bothersome, though,
so I'm going to experiment with some acoustic shielding for it.  It's not
possible to just move the disk farther away because the cable is very
short, and using a longer cable is not recommended.

Here are a few other details on the disk.  First of all, if you don't have
TOS in ROM, forget about using the hard disk.  You cannot boot from the
hard disk either -- you need to load the device driver from a floppy.

The hard disk is divided up into "partitions" or "logical disks".  You can
have up to four of them, and you can configure their sizes.  However, once
you've configured the partitions, you can't reconfigure them without
erasing the disk.

The hard disk driver seems to be hard-wired into using disks C, D, E, etc.
I haven't been able to get the hard disk to coexist with the Intersect
ramdisk because of this.

If you need more than 20 MB, you can connect up to 8 hard disks up
to your ST at the same time.  But there are limits on the total number
of directories you can have, and the number of files that can appear
in each directory.  The manual has a whole page full of warnings about
the various restrictions.

-Sandra Loosemore
sandra@utah-cs.arpa