Subject: REVIEW: Western Digital Caviar hard disk
From: [email-masked] (Saleem Khan)
Date: 30 May 1994 22:00:04 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Western Digital Caviar hard disk

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	An 340-megabyte, 3.5-inch, IDE hard disk for the Amiga 1200, Amiga
600, or any Amiga with an IDE controller.

COMPANY INFORMATION

	Sorry, but I purchased the hard drive as part of a package, so I
don't know any supplier information.  If anyone knows the information,
please send it to [email-masked].

LIST PRICE

	Again, I don't know, since I bought it with a computer.  I
think around $600 (US) might be right.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		An IDE hard disk drive controller is required.

		Every disk partition requires 30K of RAM.  If you have
		a base model Amiga, such as a 1 MB Amiga 600, you may
		want to get a RAM expansion.

		CPU speed also plays its part here.  Hard disk operations
		(read, write) are faster if you have an accelerated CPU and
		some Fast RAM.  I have also installed DiskExpander (which
		itself needs RAM to compress/decompress the data).

	SOFTWARE

		None required.

		If you would like to partition the hard disk, then you need
		some "prepping" software.  There are freely distributable
		programs on the Aminet ftp site for doing this.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 1200 series, 2MB Chip RAM, 4MB Fast RAM.
	Internal 880K floppy drive.
	External high density floppy drive.
	Kickstart 39.106 (3.0), Workbench 40.35 (3.1).

REVIEW

	If you own an Amiga without a hard disk, you ain't lived! ;)
Honestly, though, the difference between a floppy based system and a hard
disk based system is immense!

	Ever since I sold my Amiga 500, I've wanted more power.  The A1200
was the obvious, affordable choice; and coupled with 6 megabytes of RAM and
a hard disk, I thought it would be a killer product!  Well, I took the
plunge and bought a system, and it has brought me nothing but pleasure.  I
think you don't know what the Amiga can do until you have a fairly fast
machine (68020 or better), lots of memory, and a large hard disk... or at
least that's what I've found. :)

	Being the curious type, I have tested the hard disk performance just
to know how it is compared to the other hard disks available.  I was
pleasantly surprised to learn this is a very fast hard disk indeed!  Just to
show that I am not cheating, I have used two programs to test the hard disk,
and both report similar results.  The drive was tested with two different
benchmark programs -- SysInfo version 3 and SPSTrans version 1.01 -- before
and after I got my Fast RAM.  The results are tabulated below.

Program		With Fast (Megs/Second)		Without Fast (Megs/Second)
==========================================================================
SysInfo		1.78 Megabytes per second	1.41 Megabytes per Second
SPSTrans	1.76 Megabytes per second       1.39 Megabytes per Second

DOCUMENTATION

	None.  Now the specifications... *YUMMY* >8)

		Device Size:	340961280 bytes
		Device Name:	WDC AC234H
		Heads	   :	12
		Sectors	   :	55
		Cylinders  :	1010
		Seek time  :	less than 15ms

LIKES AND DISLIKES

	What do I like about this hard disk?  Everything!  It does what it
is supposed to do very well.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Although I have friends with A1200 computers and hard disks, they
don't have Fast RAM.  Therefore, all the details next are for a basic A1200
(my Fast RAM removed).  I know these figures, as I had to sort the machines
for my friends because I know how to do it and they don't! >8)

	Hard disk	 Data Transfer rate /sec
	========================================
	This hard disk   1.4Megs
	Conner 60 meg    600K
	Quantum          900K

BUGS

	None found.  The drives mentioned above seem to have problems.  One
of them seems to spin up, but the "Insert Kickstart" 3.0 animation is
shown.  A warm reset cures this; but if it was my machine, I would be very
annoyed. ;)

	One thing to note is that HDToolBox uses some very strange MASK
number as a default value.  Therefore, when you re-partition the drive, you
must enter the correct one(s). The values at present are:

	Mask 	     :	0x7ffffffc
	Max Transfer :  0x1fe00

These values seem to work fine.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	Never returned it! >8)

WARRANTY

	One year warranty on the computer provided by CBM itself, and one
year on the drive by Western Digital.

CONCLUSIONS

	If you've been thinking of getting a large capacity hard disk, then
this would be a nice choice.  Also, if you plan to buy a hard disk again,
this is a good choice.  It may seem like a lot of disk space, but I've
filled about 80% of it and I'm still going strong.;)  (Thats if I was to
uncompress the data that is already compressed.) If you think it's still too
much here the result from the AmigaDos INFO command:

	Mounted disks:

	Unit	  Size	  Used	  Free Full Errs   Status   Name
	DH1:      200M  199596  210922  49%   0  Read/Write HardDisk
	Amax:    7862K      27   16471   0%   0  Read/Write Emptyhd
	OTHER:    116M  207689   30569  87%   0  Read/Write Other

The partition "SYS:" is compressed using the xpkNUKE compression library.
The information for this partition is:

	DiskExpander Statistics v2.110  by Markus Bader
	(C) 1993 Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe

	Listing of path 'sys:':

	Original  Packed  PackRate  Library    Name
	-------- -------- -------- ---------- -------------
	[deleted file names to save space]
	-------- -------- -------- ---------- -------------
	137496731 94852534   31.0%             7923 files

	For a final result, I give this hard disk five stars out of five.
It works just like it should, and it is very good compared to other hard
disks that work on the A1200.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	You may do with this review as you want as long as you don't claim
to have written it. :)  I also take no responsibility for the information
contained in this document which is correct as far as I know at this present
time.

	 Copyright 1994 Saleem Khan  (Duggy).  All rights reserved.
   	    (Congrats Duster on your new baby, and you JimBeam)

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