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Comment by zepearl | Hacker News Reader

I owned an Amiga 500 and at a certain point I bought for it a HDD (20 MBs, if I remember correctly) => then later I switched to an IBM-compatible (386sx with a HDD) and, subjectively, I thought that the HDD of the IBM-compatible was slower than the one I previously used on the Amiga => any HW reason why the Amiga-HDD might be faster than the IBM-HDD, or did I just imagine it?

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It might have been a SCSI drive/controller, but it might have also been that you used FastFileSystem, which was pretty efficient.

One of the HD manufacturers of the time, either Conner or Maxtor, was known to use Amiga 3000 machines to test their SCSI disks, because of the CPU/chipset/OS/FS combination. Not many systems were able to extract 90%+ of theoretical throughput like the A3000 could.

Thx - it was just some sort of standard HDD for Amiga 500 - cannot remember anything specific about it... .

Can it be that the Amiga 500 had in its case a place for a HDD? (I don't remember using external cases, but maybe I have forgotten...)

The A590 was a drive that plugged on the left side of the A500. It usually came with a 20MB SCSI disk inside...

There was no room in the A500 for a 3.5" drive. Later, the A1200 and A600 had a built-in IDE controller and an internal bay, but for a 2.5" disk.

The 590 had a SCSI controller with DMA, but only for the external SCSI connector. The internal drive was 8-but IDE and dog slow. So if it was faster, it must be chalked up to better OS, better filesystem and I would assume a 68000 at 7Mhz was faster than a 4.77Mhz 8088 at shuffling data around. Especially since the memory data bus was 16 bit wide for the Amiga but only 8 bit wide for the PC. (Right?!)

The A590 had both a SCSI and an XT header for internal drives (on the right side):

http://amiga.resource.cx/photos/photos/a590-5.jpg

I only ever saw them with SCSI drives in person, but they also sold XT units. Maybe you saw the latter?

If they sold'em with XT-IDE inside, I was probably unfortunate to have on of those. Still beat swapping floppies. Thanks to the HDD I could compile C programs without switching floppies all the time. IIRC I had the compiler and the headers on one floppy and the linker etc on another. Eventually I made DICE (Matt Dillon yo!) fit on one floppy. Or was it an early Lattice C?? Can't remember.:-P By that time I had bought a 486SX for uni, so I reluctantly used Turbo C instead. Turbo C was just too good to pass up...

Yes, you're right - it was the A590, thx!

Part of it may also have been that even expansions that used non-SCSI drives tended to offload most of the processing from the CPU. My A2000 SCSI card had a Z80 on it, for example.

Amiga was very likely a SCSI drive vs IDE

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