![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/ST251.jpg\" "\\"ST251\\"")
<\/a>The earliest standard was the ST-506 interface, developed by Shugart Associates in 1980 and rapidly adopted by other manufacturers.\u00c2\u00a0 The drives were basic, taking control signals in and returning raw magnetic stream information to the controller card, but they worked – providing the controller card and drive would speak to each other.\u00c2\u00a0 Drives really were dumb, needing everything doing for them because they were just there to read flux changes of a disk. It’s not an accident that IDE stands for Intelligent Drive Electronics, because these precursors to that system were anything but!<\/p>\nController cards using 8-bit ISA interfaces were the standard way of connecting these to computers, and thanks to a bit of ingenuity these PC controller cards could be used on other systems.\u00c2\u00a0 Omti was probably the best known manufacturer of such cards.
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\nAnd here, finally, we start the review.\u00c2\u00a0 Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the Spirit Technologies HDA-506.<\/p>\n
Considering that 16GB MicroSD cards are now common, it’s good to see Moore’s law<\/a> is alive and well in 2011.<\/p>\n The cabling is a straightfoward affair, with power, control and data cables to be connected from drive chassis to controller card.\u00c2\u00a0 The provision of a supply for the controller card is a nice touch, ensuring your Amiga’s power supply will not be unduly strained\u00c2\u00a0 by the new arrival.<\/p>\n The manual is clear, and well written, and despite the number of steps to be gone through works well, taking you through physical stuff through to low level formatting, sorting your mountlists out, mapping out bad sectors and getting autoboot working.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s worth noting that drives of this era typically have a bad sector list printed on the drive, but there’s no facility provided for manually mapping these out: you have to hope that the mapbad program finds them. The feeling of joy at getting away with less sectors mapped than the drive states is tinged with worry that you’ve got an unreliable drive…<\/p>\n HDA506 Formatter<\/p><\/div>\n ‘Park’ is worth mentioning, as some of the audience won’t be aware of its function. These drives are quite literally dumb, and need to be told what to do.\u00c2\u00a0 When powering off, they’ll just spin down leaving the heads where they were meaning a jolt would cause the head to crash into the disk platter, causing potential damage.\u00c2\u00a0 Parking moves the heads to the outermost cylinder, which is unused for data meaning a head crash should not cause problems.\u00c2\u00a0 Parking drives before powering down is therefore a good habit.\u00c2\u00a0 As a side note, the ST-251 drive did autopark as, when power is removed, the drive motor acts as a generator causing the stepper motor to move the heads to a safe position which strikes me as a beautifully elegant piece of engineering.<\/p>\n HDA506 driver contents<\/p><\/div>\n Kickstart 1.3 or higher is required to support autobooting.\u00c2\u00a0 The device does not support the RDB standard, so the autoboot process is a bit of a kludge: the EPROM code assumes that the first 6 cylinders of the disk are the autoboot partition using OFS, and mounts them as such.\u00c2\u00a0 This small partition then contains just enough to mount the rest of your disk (or disks) from hand-crafted mountlist entries. Naturally more filesystems such as FastFileSystem or whatever your personal penchant is can be installed and used, too.<\/p>\n Given the device was designed to work with Kickstart 1.2 originally and the autoboot capability had to be designed with incomplete specifications, this is forgivable. This setup cost \u00c2\u00a3500 in 1988 for a 20MB system, or \u00c2\u00a320 off ebay if you see one.\u00c2\u00a0 It predates SCSI solutions from other manufacturers by some way, so should not be compared with them.\u00c2\u00a0 The ST-225 has proved itself to be astonishingly reliable: bearings are a little noisy, but the drive still works and this must be one of the most outstandingly over-engineered drives.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve added an ST-251-1 giving me a total of 60MB for my Amiga 1000.\u00c2\u00a0 The combo has been faultless for over 2 decades, which still amazes me.<\/p>\n Hard drives. For the Amiga. In 1989. What was the state of the Art? Read on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[23,24,22,18,17,19,20,21],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amiga","category-reviews","tag-23","tag-24","tag-amiga-2","tag-hda-506","tag-hda506","tag-omti","tag-st-225","tag-st-251-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>The package here consists of an interface adaptor that connects the provided 8-bit XT controller card to your Amiga’s expansion port, a chassis for the hard drive including a power supply, a 20MB ST-225 hard disk, all necessary cables, a driver disk and a manual. This version is the autoboot version, so an Autoboot EPROM is included.<\/p>\n
\nUtilities provided include the low-level formatter, mapbad program, Park program and scripts to initialise your hard disk for first boot.\u00c2\u00a0 They work, but are a not quite optimised.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
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\nPerformance wise, it’s hard to know how to rate this: we’re dealing with decades old technology here from the infancy of consumer hard drives.\u00c2\u00a0 Seek times could be realistically measured in seconds for full disk scans, however sustained transfer rates are fairly good at around 500KB\/s.\u00c2\u00a0 Put into context, that’s over half an Amiga floppy a second, which is the alternative and so in context the performance is good.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n Ratings (in 80s context) for Spirit HDA-506<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n Performance<\/td>\n 7\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Slow, but quick compared to what else is out there. Points dropped for autoboot approach.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Value for money<\/td>\n 8\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n At \u00c2\u00a3500 for 20MB, it’s a lot of money but it’s expandable using off the shelf hardware<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Reliability<\/td>\n 10\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n It’s over 20 years old and working perfectly.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Ease of use<\/td>\n 7\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Software setup is OK. Needs mountlist knowledge (but then there’s no real alternative). It autoboots, but it has its quirks<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Overall<\/td>\n 8\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Overlooked when the GVP and A590 came out, but class leading for a brief while!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"