From: honp9@menudo.uh.edu (Jason L. Tibbitts III) Organization: Blob Shop Programmers Subject: REVIEW: AdIDE Keywords: hardware, interface, hard drive, IDE Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Reply-To: an353@cleveland.freenet.edu (Adam Benjamin) The AdIDE is an intermal hard drive interface designed to connect Amiga 500's, 1000's and 2000's to IDE type hard drives. The interface is a fine performer, but both hardware and software problems hindered the installation procedure. [Moderator's note: yet again, the reviewer left out the summary. The above are my own words. I'm doing this in the interests of expediency, but please help me by thoroughly reading the guidelines. Thanks! JLT3] This review is of the AdIDE hard drive interface from ICD inc. 1220 Rock St., Rockford, IL 61101. Phone (815)968-2228. This interface allows the Amiga 500, 1000, or 2000 owner to connect up to two autobooting IDE drives to their computer. It comes in two models, the AdIDE44 for the 2.5 inch drives that go inside the 500 and the AdIDE40 for the 3.5 inch drives. The support software is buggy and some commands are irrelevant since the software is for the AdSCSI interface as well. If you are lucky enough to get it set up it is a very nice package, but getting there can be an adventure. First, a little info on IDE. IDE is very similar to SCSI, both have the controller embedded right on the hard drive. Both accept simple commands from the computer and do all the overhead themselves, making them much faster than the old XT type hard drives. The IDE concept was developed with the PC-AT in mind so only two IDE drives can be connected together (unlike SCSI). Unfortunately, IDE has no official ANSI specifications which has led to more than 24 slightly different variations of the drives. The AdIDE interface is a small 1" by 3" board that plugs into the 68000 socket on your computer (sorry A2500 owners). Then the CPU plugs on top of the interface. This rules out most accelerator boards that also plug in this way simply because there is no more room under the keyboard. Depending on which model you buy, it has a connector for a 44 pin cable (for the 2.5 inch drives) or a 40 pin cable (for bigger drives). It has another connector for an optional drive access LED and a jumper for selecting the autobooting option. The AdIDE44 interface is sold bundled with a 2.5 inch 20meg drive ready to go inside a 500. The AdIDE40 can also go in a 500 but comes with no drive since it is really made for the 1000 or 2000. If you use the 40 pin unit with a 500 the drive will have to be mounted externally and you will need to supply power for the drive as well. ICD supplies the software drivers you need along with a formatted program for setting up partitions on the drive. I chose the AdIDE40 for use with my 500 because I had access to several cheap 3.5 inch IDE drives. I had some trouble convincing some mail order houses that the AdIDE40 would work just fine, but finally got on the waiting list to get one. When it arrived I immediately tossed the manual away (oops) I mean I carefully read through the manual and saw that it was confusing because it kept referring to the AdSCSI board, with only an occasional mention of IDE. I plugged everything in and flipped the power on... nothing. I spent the next half hour cleaning, bending, then straightening the pins trying to get them to make good contact. The socket for the CPU on the interface is "less than adequate" to say the least. Finally it sprang to life! Now on to the software. I booted with the disk supplied by ICD and loaded the formatter program. Once again I spotted trouble when everything seemed to evolve around the SCSI interface and not the IDE. There are options that have no bearing to an IDE drive, like FORMAT for instance. You never low-level format an IDE drive, most drives simply ignore the request, or change it into something like VERIFY. The manual says nothing about this. What is supposed to happen when the formatter software is run is that the interface is "polled" to see what is connected to it and a window opens with the device number and name of the drives. Well, the 80meg drive I was using was not ready to divulge that information, and came up with a blank in the window where its name should have been. The formatter program looks in an ASCII table to find a match to the drive name it gets from the interface and reads the drive parameters from that table. Well if the drive returns no name, of course there is no match in the table! This is a poor way to get drive information since not all drives will return a name when asked (no standard, remember?). ICD has one failsafe, if the program cannot match the name it gets from the interface with one in the table it asks you for the IBM bios number of the drive. Unfortunately, there is no bios number that matches an 80meg drive either. So I tried a 40meg drive with the same results, no name. IT did , however, have an entry in the IBM bios table so using that I managed to get it working. I partitioned it and copied a bunch of files to it while I waited for Monday to call the tech support at ICD. The tech support team was less than enthusiastic to help me over the phone. They suggested I send the whole thing back along with the drive so they could test it. (some support?) After 15 days I got it back and was surprised to find that they had replaced the ROM in my hard drive (for free!). I called them and they confirmed that the code in the original ROM was not set up to comply with what the interface expected. They had also formatted the drive for me and installed Workbench. I hooked it back up to my 500, again fighting with the loose socket problem for a half hour, and it worked like a charm. In summary, I am still very happy with the AdIDE interface it is fast, small, and quiet. If you do not mind tinkering with things, I would suggest the AdIDE40 for all systems, because you can get 3.5 inch drives with more capacity cheaper than 2.5 inch ones. On the other hand, you run the risk of having to get a new ROM for your drive, or not having your drive work at all. If you want a hard drive on your 500 and have no desk space or do not like tinkering, the bundle is still a good deal. But be warned 20meg fills quickly! Here are the speed comparisons as reported by DiskSpeed 3.1 - Copyright (c)1989,90 by MKSoft Development Device DH0: AdIDE with Conner CP342 40meg drive Test Intensity medium Performance stress: NONE 23 files create 33 files open/close 96 files scan 28 files delete 193 files seek/read Device DH0: AdIDE with Quantum 80AT Test Intensity medium Performance Stress: NONE 17 files create 40 files open/close 123 files scan 17 files delete 77 files seek/read The Quantum really out performs the Conner when you add buffers because the Quantum as a built-in disk cache that stacks the data. DMA contention cuts the performance about in half. -- // | "Keyboard not responding \X/ Af987@yfn.ysu.edu | press ESC to continue" Yes, another AMIGA fanatic | ^PC logic in action ^^