Date   : Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:56:26
From   : rs423@... (Mick)
Subject: [BeebSoc] Re: Amstrad emailer / DataCentre

J.G.Harston wrote:
> Mick wrote:
>   
>> What size disc are you using? Is there a limit with HDinit? I won't ask
>>     
>
> There's no limit to HDInit, but ADFS limits devices to 512M as it
> uses a 29-bit sector address. IDE ADFS assigns two devices per
> drive and uses half the 16-bit sectors, so a 2G IDE device is seen
> by ADFS as two 512M devices.
>   
Since my last post, I've ripped a 4 Gig hard disc from a now dead doze98 
PC. I've connected this drive to the IDE interface that came with the 
IDE / CF card using FC5x PAL from RetroClinic so I can run the ST506 
(working drive) at the same time using my own patch of  of ADFS 1.33.  
All works very well and I'm more than impressed. :-)  This really is not 
a complaint, *but* I'm slightly disappointed with the speed of read / 
write. I guess I've been spoilt the speed of the ST506 drives.  It takes 
over a second to save 4k, less than a second to load with an IDE. This 
compares with almost instant with an ST506 (scrape clunk and program is 
there / saved)....... Reality check-This compared to a week by tape ;-)  
Forget speed though, the real important thing is IDE is a reality ** 
thanks to JGH, Michael Firth and Mark Haysman. Has anyone tried an IDE 
to SATA converter? If that worked, that really would be great for the 
future for IDE drives will surely become obsolete sooner rather than later.

** Sorry if I've missed someone out. Did the other genius 'Sprow' have 
some input? I'm sure he did.


> I've currently got a 1600M drive plugged into my Master, seen by
> ADFS as a 800M device giving a 512M drive and a 288M drive, I also
> have four 16M HADFS partitions on it.
>   
In HDinit, I got the option to save space for HADFS. This I did, and 
formatted the 4 drives 4-7 (on logical device zero-the hard disc).  I'm 
pretty sure my version of HADFS (if I can find it) is so old, it won't 
even look at the 1MHz bus. Does HADFS (modern) claim any workspace? The 
version I had / have didn't. Oh, and is the maximum size of a HADFS 
drive 16MB? It was the default size using HDinit (512MB for ADFS) so I 
presume (perhaps wrongly) that it is. This is more than adequate 
though.  If page remains at &1900 or below, then that would be superb.


Cheers,


Mick.