Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: harv@cup.portal.com (Harv Laser) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Dell DX9 High Density external floppy drive Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 30 Nov 1995 03:31:50 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 227 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <49j8j6$k2j@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: harv@cup.portal.com (Harv Laser) NNTP-Posting-Host: quincy.cs.umass.edu Keywords: hardware, floppy, high density, commercial Originator: barrett@quincy.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Dell DX9 High Density external floppy drive for Amigas BRIEF DESCRIPTION A tiny, relatively inexpensive add-on for any Amiga computer. It gives your Amiga the ability to read from and write to high density format floppy disks in various OS formats, depending on what filesystem is installed. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Anti Gravity Products Address: 456 Lincoln Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90402 USA Telephone: 1-310-393-6650 or 1-800-7GRAVITY FAX: 1-310-576-6383 (West Coast USA) Email: antigrav@ix.netcom.com LIST PRICE Anti Gravity sells this drive for $125 (US). I do not know if that is different than the manufacturer's list price or not, nor do I know the names of other dealers who carry it. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga computer with a free floppy drive port. SOFTWARE CrossDOS or similar for access to MS-DOS HD floppies MaxDOS or similar for access to Mac HD floppies (Amiga OS can already handle Amiga HD floppies) MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1200, 2 MB chip RAM, 8 MB fast RAM AmigaDOS 3.0 GVP A1230 Turbo card with 40Mhz 030/882 Toshiba 540 Meg internal IDE hard drive Commodore 1084S monitor Boing! three button optical mouse :) INSTALLATION Connect Amiga floppy drive cable to back of disk drive. Connect other end of cable to floppy drive port on back of computer. No tools required. Really difficult. :) REVIEW I didn't particularly need to format Amiga floppy disks of 1760K capacity, but since I go to a lot of trade shows and often get demo disks of stuff at those shows and in the mail, and those disks are usually MS-DOS or Mac format High Density disks, I had no way, up till now, to read them. (Without an emulator you can't run alien software on an Amiga, of course, but you can still suck files off their disks: any plain text files such as press releases or source code, images in various formats and etc.) Standard Amiga floppy drives, while they can easily use HD floppy disk media and format it to 880K (Amiga) or 720K MS DOS (with CrossDOS built into the system software) cannot access any high density formats at all. So this drive fills a need I'd been needing to fill for a couple years, since HD floppies became the norm on PeeCees and Macs. (They're not yet the norm on Amigas). This is quite a slick little drive. It's made by Dell, the PC Clown manufacturer, and it is absolutely the tiniest external floppy drive I've ever seen. In fact, just eyeballing it, it would appear that about six of these drives would consume the same amount of cubic space as a single old Amiga 1010 floppy drive. It's about 1/2" high by maybe 4" wide by maybe 6" deep. It is matte black in color, painted or perhaps clad with some kind of rubbery surface coating not unlike my Newton message pad. (Guaranteed not to match any of your typical beige computing equipment, but who cares). My guess is that it's designed as a laptop computer accessory and Dell has simply adapted it to the Amiga with the special cable that comes with it. A label on its belly indicates that it's model number "DX9" and that it's made in Japan. The front face of the drive where the disk slides in is, in fact, so short that there's literally no place on it for an eject button! So disk ejection is via a thumb-shaped slider on the extreme front right hand corner of the top of the drive body. With no disk inserted, a tiny door covers the disk opening to keep out dust and the other impurities of modern civilization. The two-foot-long connection cable is interesting -- on one end is a fairly standard-looking Amiga floppy drive connector, but on the other end which connects to the drive is a very strange (at least I've never seen one before) card-edge connector. It's a green PCB with traces painted on it and two little tabs on either side to guide it and hold it into the female connector on the ass end of the drive. Peering down into the cable's connector fitting, it looks like someone has hot-glued the assembly together. There is nothing inherently wrong with this method of assembly -- I just mention it for the sake of completeness. It's a very tight fit into the drive's connector, and the cable end isn't marked "this side up," so I took a chance and connected it with a large white dot facing up (I assumed the large white dot on the connector shielding meant "this side up"). This required quite a few foot-pounds of pressure, and I had no idea if the cable was correctly seated until I re-powered my 1200 to see if the drive was recognized. Luckily, I had done it correctly. Had I put the cable on upside-down, I don't know what the result would have been. A side note here: in a chat on Portal, I was telling some folks about this drive, and one guy mentioned that his friend had bought one from a shop in the SF Bay area, but that it had come with its own external power supply. My drive came with no separate power supply, and takes its power off the Amiga's own powered pin(s) on the floppy drive port. In fact I can see nowhere on my drive where one could even plug in a power supply connector. I can only assume that there are a couple different models of this drive. Naturally, the one that takes power directly from the Amiga is preferable. I have entirely too many "wall wart" AC power adaptors already! Once connected, I dragged the PC1 CrossDOS driver on my 1200's 3.0 Workbench from Workbench:storage/dosdrivers into Devs:dosdrivers and clicked it to start it up. (Rebooting would have had the same effect.) I also installed Media4's "MaxDOS" package which allows an Amiga to read Mac formatted HD floppies or SCSI media. (MaxDOS is not included with the Dell HD drive -- I'd had it laying around for a couple months as a review copy, unable to use it because until today I didn't have a HD floppy drive :) With three different file systems looking at the drive each time a new floppy is inserted (DF1, PC1 and MF1), the delay before it can be accessed, and the number of blinks of its tiny front panel green light, are lengthened by a couple seconds. No big deal, really. So now I have a drive which can handle all kinds of formats of 3.5" floppy disks. According to Directory Opus 5's formatting requester, I can format this sucker as: AmigaDOS High Density format: 1760K MaxDOS Mac High Density format: 1440K CrossDOS MS DOS High Density format: 1440K along with regular low density formats (if a low density floppy is inserted, I assume. One can tell a HD floppy from a regular one by the "HD" logo on it and by the fact that it has another square sensor hole on the opposite side of the disk as the usual hole) MaxDOS has a lot of other features for handling Mac HD floppies, but that's the subject of another review, another time. Nic Wilson's SysInfo 3.24 clocks the Dell HD floppy drive at roughly the same speed as my 1200's internal standard non HD Amiga floppy drive: about 24K/sec. Nothing special. I cannot report to you the sturdiness or longevity of this drive because I've only had it for one day. :) With no disk in the drive, it does click, although very quietly: a bit less than my A1200's internal drive, and much more quietly than the old Commodore A1010 external drives. With the drive came no instruction manual (don't really need one except perhaps for the weird connector) nor warranty card. In fact, the drive was sent to me in a plain padded envelope inside a mailing carton. When the UPS driver handed me this skinny package, I thought, "no way is there a disk drive in here!" I asked Anti Gravity about the lack of documentation, and they told me that's exactly the way they get the drives from Dell. No manual and no warranty card, but they said that the drive has a one-year warranty. VENDOR SUPPORT AND SMALL DISCLAIMER In the unlikely case this drive needs warranty repair, I suppose I would contact Anti Gravity Products. No contact information for Dell was included. I also need to mention that I did not pay cash for this drive. I did a small bit of work for Anti Gravity involving a software manual for one of their products and they paid me with this drive. However, this has been my only dealing with them and I should not be mistaken as an employee nor as any kind of agent for them or any of their related companies. I wrote this review because I felt the Amiga community might like to learn about this slick little drive, not because I felt I owed Anti Gravity any favors. SUMMARY Basically, this little drive just plain works and now I can handle those foreign high density floppy formats for all those disks I pick up here and there. Installation is trivial except for the slightly strange press-on cable connection to the drive. Rather than a white dot on the connector, they could've spent 3 cents more and put a "this side up" sticker on it! COPYRIGHT Copyright 1995 Harv Laser. This review can be reprinted in non-commercial publications. To use this review for other purposes, please contact the author at harv@cup.portal.com --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews