Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!jack!wolf!uzun
From: uzun@wolf.UUCP (Roger Uzun)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Cheap Hard Disks for A2000.
Message-ID: <668@wolf.UUCP>
Date: 20 Apr 88 07:48:55 GMT
References: <419@hvrunix.UUCP> <2576@umd5.umd.edu>
Reply-To: uzun@wolf.SanDiego.NCR.COM (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Organization: Systems'n'Software  San Diego, CA
Lines: 29
Keywords: Help!

Well you purchased the a2090 instead of the pacific peripherals card
I have used both and a few facts are in order

1) Pacific Peripherals card allows each and every partition to be
   FFS format, A2090 does not.
2) Pacific peripherals card will auto boot with ROM revision
   A2090 will not to my knowledge
3) Diskperf with the Old File system showed Pac Peripheral card to
   be faster.
4) The A2090 card held the reset line low on power up until a 
   BindDrivers call was made resulting is slight compatibility
   problems for some SCSI disks (eg had to warm boot them since the
   drives would not spin up until reset line went high)

Based on my experience I would recomend the pacific peripherals board
but it has 2 major drawbacks

1) When doing large block xfers it raises the interrupt level to like
   5 or 6 for long periods of time resulting in lock out of serial
   port and keyboard devices.  This will be fixed soon they say by
   a slightly slower device driver that does not have this problem.

2) It will only support SCSI drives so even though you save $$ on the
   Controller you may not save $$ in the long run.

In the end you must decide, if it were me right now I would probably 
wait and see what the HardFrame Card from Microbotics will look like.

-Roger