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From: hue@netcom.UUCP (Jonathan Hue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A590 experience anyone ?
Summary: works great!
Message-ID: <2593@netcom.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 89 02:46:55 GMT
References: <118@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Organization: NetCom- The Bay Area's Public Access Unix System {408 997-9175 guest}
Lines: 40

In article <118@philica.ica.philips.nl>, tom@philica.ica.philips.nl (Tom van Peer) writes:
> is there anyone using the A590 who would like to convey his experiences ?
> I am specially interested in:

I've got one and it's worked out great for me so far.  Before that I tried
a C. Ltd and an Expansion Technologies controller and had to return both as
they were DOA.

> a) speed of the little bugger

It'll depend mostly on how fast your drive is.  I have a CDC Wren III (SCSI)
disk hooked up to it and it's way faster than the 20MB PC drive that's built
into it.  (sorry, I don't have diskperf)  BTW, this is one of those $695
Wren III's (148MB formatted) I got from some computer liquidators in
Sunnyvale, CA.

> b) ease of use.  How easy is it to add memory or other SCSI devices ?

To add memory you have to take it apart, but the installation is
straightforward.  Adding my Wren was truly a joy.  The A590 comes some very
easy to use software.  To add another disk drive you run a program called
"HDToolbox".  The first thing it does is go out and look at all the devices
on the SCSI bus (plus other PC disks).  It reported my Wren at ID 2, but
reported its type as "unknown", so I had to click on the "Change Drive Type"
button, which brought up a new window.  Since the Wren III wasn't a drive
type known to it, I clicked on "Read Configuration from Drive".  The Wren
can report it's name, manufacturer, revision, and capacity through the
SCSI Inquire and Mode Sense commands, so HDToolbox was able to fill in all the
information for me.  From there all you have to do is click two "OK" boxes,
click on "Low Level Format" (probably not necessary as the Wren had been
formatted already), click "Save Changes to Drive", click "Exit", and then do
an AmigaDOS format (I did it from the Workbench menu).  So that's a total of
about fifteen mouse clicks and zero keystrokes to add another SCSI disk.  I
didn't even need to know anything about the drive, HDToolbox is smart enough
to find out everything it needs to know from the disk.

The A590 comes with all the normal files on a Workbench disk plus the hard
disk tools already installed, so you can just plug it in and boot from it.

-Jonathan