SD Card in Atari Falcon

[BoNuS]

Since I am back on the Atari Falcon again and ofcourse this old beast has a bad harddisk I was looking for
an good alternative. Seeing already a number of good solutions I tried one of my own.
And I didn't find an article about this solution so I made a new topic

Compact Flash (I/II) are rather common here I already saw, but here in the Netherlands CF cards aren't that
cheap (yes I'm dutch so money is always an issue ) I already had some SD card lying here so I thought that
would be handy to use them. But is seems that those cardreaders are a little bit harder to get by.

Lucky me I found a shop in nearby that could help me. So here is the result:
2Gb Secure Digital (SD) card working in an Atari Falcon on the IDE channel





And thanks to HHDriver 8.23 this is what I could see. Formating, chop it
up in bite size pieces and....



Works very good, I first tried it with an old 64Mb card and when that was
working I used a bigger card. Formating took a whole lot longer but
hey, I now got 2Gb working (5 partitions).

Is it faster than the CF I/II, I don;t know. So if anybody has an benchmark
proggie I would test it.

SD card vs CF I/II card
+ Sofar for me the price

- Removing the card in my adaptor is a bit difficult, because it is so small.
It's quite stuck in the holder, but them again how often do you have to
remove a 2 GB card on a Falcon

Costs: I bought the adaptor for 15 euro, the card costs me 5 euro. That's not much for
a SSD harddrive I could say.
I'm thinking about doing a test with the old 64 mb card, trying to write to one spot a file
over and over again to see when it fails. Just to see if the SD card is reliable to serve as an HD.
I already heard of CF card that they suffer from data lose but only aftyer a big number of writes.

[ppera]

Cool. And what is the price of used IDE-SD adapter ?

I have some bencmark prgs here: http://ppera.07x.net/atari/speeat.html

[BoNuS]

Your fast, I was still editing my post

I already found a suplier in Hong Kong via Ebay for these item's. I don't know if it is 100%
the same so I orderd one. Also orderd about 9 CF readers, for laptop testing.Hope it will
be here next week and then I can tell. SD adaptor costs about 15 US dollar each including shipping.

For the tricky removal of the SD card I think I have come up with a solution
Us an micro SD card in an SD adaptor sleeve , this way swapping should be easy and another
benifit is that you don't stress the contact points of the SD apator to much.


I just orderd 2 of them for 10 euro So expect results next week also...
See if it works...

[Mug UK]

If you ever need any MicroSD adapters - I've got a few you can have for nothing. I got a load for use with SatanDisk and these old 256/512MB MicroSD cards that I was getting for next to nothing. Got all the protective case ones that I need so the rest are cluttering up the desk. Want them?

[BoNuS]

Hi mike,

Yeah, can use a few of them, say 3 max. I think I will have to "rebuild" a few Falcons
in the near future once the rest sees how good this works

Once the hardware is up and running I can start with the software, loads to watch
and test. Gotta a lot of Falcon up-dates to test Sofar I just did what I had to do
the get it al running again.

Anybody already busy getting USB running on the Atari's ????

[teh3pwner]

Anybody already busy getting USB running on the Atari's ????

We already have the hardware, but the drivers are the problem (hard to write, I guess), there is only a mouse driver avalible.

Check out these links:
http://www.janthomas.org.uk/
http://hardware.atari.org/netusbee/index.htm
http://hardware.atari.org/netusbee/netus.htm

[Jookie]

Anybody already busy getting USB running on the Atari's ????

What hardware would you like to connect through USB?

Because:
- for mouse and keyboards you have PS2-to-atari interfaces, and connecting those through USB would be a waste of processing power
- for mass storage you have CF cards, SD and MMC cards, which you can connect to ST through IDE from ppera or SatanDisk, UltraSatan for the SD/MMC cards. The SD card might already be combined with USB card reader: http://joo.kie.sk/ultrasatan/microsd.jpg
so for connecting to ST you can use it in SatanDisk or UltraSatan, and you can directly connect it to PC via USB

So... What hardware you want for ST, that you would like to have USB on ST and connect it trhough USB?

[Shredder11]

Printers, Scanners, Networking or just a simple connection between the ST and PC. This is just a very quick response with no proper thought prior to posting, so don't flame me!

[Jookie]

Printers, Scanners, Networking or just a simple connection between the ST and PC. This is just a very quick response with no proper thought prior to posting, so don't flame me!

The USB would be a nice thing if all those many different printers, scanners, network cards wouldn't require many different drivers, which would someone need to write.

So you should do your printing and scanning on your PC, and for the networking use EtherNEC or something similar. And for the simple connection between ST and PC use serial cable or ParCP

[BoNuS]

Indeed, not only storage but a printer or scanner, maybe even an I-pod
Or my digital camera via USB upload pictures to my Atari.
As een Atari-fan I would like to boost a bit about it ofcourse.
Like "My 20 year old Atari can do that too, with only 4mb instead of 4Gb"

And to be honest, I just was curious to see if anybody had done it

http://hardware.atari.org/netusbee/netus.htm
Looks good btw its a start and a good one !

[Jookie]

As een Atari-fan I would like to boost a bit about it ofcourse.
Like "My 20 year old Atari can do that too, with only 4mb instead of 4Gb"

Yeah, and we should definitely make a HD video editing software for ST, so I could do the video processing and DVD burning on my ST with 4MB of RAM

[BoNuS]

So finaly I got some time again and yes my Micro SD cards have arrived I can only say, if you are
using SD cards in de Falcon use then with an Micro adaptor. This is so much easier to remove and
its much better for your cardreader. You don't stress the delicate contacts so much and is the
microadaptor is defective is much easier and cheaper to replace
And they work just as fine !!!

You see:

ooo and btw the disk is just for keeping the contacts of the PCB of the steel bracket


I also tried Hushi tools with this card reader and it work good, although I didn't manage
to boot from the SD card. Why Hushi tools, well I got the Falcon of Wingleader here also
for some repairs.

I am going off-topic here a bit but you have to see this

His old Conner 64 Mb wasn't acces-able anymore and a load of his old stuff was still on it.
I knew that in the past he was using Hushi tools and I hope to gain acces with the 6.52 version
again. The software worked alright but the disk remained unreadable
The HD started ip but after a few seconds it stopt again. The restarted and so on...

Liseningen to the noise it made I though something is wrong, because I didn't hear the head
clicking from left to right. An old trick, and a destructive one to, is to gentle hit the HD case
to make it move again (this is almost a last resort !!!!). With old Seagates this trick worked
fine but remember to back-up you data once you used this method. The suffered from
sticky heads in the past. So back-up is a must, you might not be so lucky next time...

But even after a gentle knock no action. So this called for even more drastic methods.
NNOOOO don't use a bigger hamer
Since the cover isi screwed on the only way is to unscrew it and look insite. Again only
as a last resort. So I did...



Nice view of the inside ain't it. Then I started his machine again and the drive started to turn
again. And it stopped again as before. Nou I waited till it started again and gentle move the
head a little. I made a little klick and it started moving again It moved a few times and
the HD kept running now. So I thought re-boot and wait...
First I hooked up my ZIP drive to make a back-up if this would really work...



I was lucky enough to boot now from the HD again, saying Conner 63Mb found an
voila up and running. So the hushi install on the Conner saw my ZIP and I could start
the back-up.It didn't went 100% smoothly but all data has been saved...
Needless to say that this was the last real good action from the Conner, although I
screwed the cover back on after a backup session of 2 hours it was done for.

It doesn't started up anymore, the head is again stuck on track 0. So this machine will also
be fitted with an CF / SD card reader, lucky I bought several spares to replace old HD's.

I still have to preform the speed test but I found yet another job to do which old falcons
suffer from. That infamous clock isn't running anymore so I have to fix that on all 3 machines
here. Since time is a luxery I don't have much I will have to do this first...

[Desty]

Wow, that's a good recovery job

[BoNuS]

What else can you do I was glad I could save the sources. Now the unit hangs on the wall
and the CF is build in. No more moving parts, but even CF isn't 100% relaiable.

[wongck]

So what is the speed of the SD card like on the falc?
Ran any benchmark yet?

[KLund1]

I've been trying to do this, but I want to keep the HD AND have a removable SD card.
I've got all the parts, & cables. But I can not get the HD and SD drive to work on the same bus. I've tried all the master/slave jumper combos on both drives. Nothing seems to work.
After to Falcon boots from floppy with HDDriver in the auto folder. I run HDutilies and it dose not see either drive.
When both drives are connected, the HD spins up, but does not make the usual couple of clicks it dose when I boots as the only drive on the bus.
Suggestions?

[BoNuS]

I don't know if the Falcon can handle 2 drives on its IDE bus. With a pc you can use 2 on 1 bus
but with the falcon I don't know

[wongck]

I don't know if the Falcon can handle 2 drives on its IDE bus. With a pc you can use 2 on 1 bus
but with the falcon I don't know

No problems with it 2 devices. I am using it daily, they are powered on. I have tested with 2nd HDD, DVD, CDrom and CF. I now stuck to DVD as it is a better choice.

My initial issue was that my SD-card cannot work as slave, only master. So I changed my HDD to Slave and let the SD card be master.
This does not work as well, and I get corruption on filenames. Probably the SD-card devices was not properly implementing some IDE master/slave and it answered to both master and slave request.
Incidently, there is NO master/slave settings on the SD card device, so go figure.
I hope this is not the problem here because there is no way out except to change the device to support IDE master/slave.

[wongck]

After to Falcon boots from floppy with HDDriver in the auto folder. I run HDutilies and it dose not see either drive.

Have you try the other HD software?
You can try ICD 6.5 from jookie's web page.
You can also try cecile from here. It's in French, there's an english version somewhere.
It seems to auto detect all attached drive on it's own, unlike HDDriver which may need to setup under HDutil.

[KLund1]

Here is my set up in my Falcon, and some screen shots of my attempt to get HDDRiver to work. As you can see when loading from a floppy with HDDriver.prg in the auto folder, on boot up, it sees nothing. But HDutilities does see the drives on the bus. But I can not format/partition/initialize.
(I loaded the pictures backwards, sorry)
If I disconnect either drive, no problems. Either by it's self boots fine.
Suggestions?

[wongck]

This is different issue from mine. I can see both as well on the HDUtil, but garbled descriptions/name.
I think mine was due to master/slave not handled properly.

Yours seems to be slightly different.
During bootup, no patition seen is due to because it cannot access the device.
Is there anyway to check the power needs of the CF device? Or may be get a smaller size CF.
Could be in your case 2 devices drain too much power?

FYI, I have tried with 2 44pin HDD and it's working.

[KLund1]

Power maybe the case. Simbo noticed in another post that some of my Caps do not look so good.
All 44 pins are exposed on the CF reader. If I dig out my analog multimeter, which pins to test (left right?)? ANd what should it read?
I can hear the HD spin up, and the light on the CF reader glows red during boot then goes after I about the memtest. When the FDD starts up and loads the driver, the CF light dose not light at all.

[wongck]

Well other than that I cannot think what else to try.