Spirit HDA-506 interface for the Amiga 500/1000

And here, finally, we start the review.  Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the Spirit Technologies HDA-506.

The package here consists of an interface adaptor that connects the provided 8-bit XT controller card to your Amiga’s expansion port, a chassis for the hard drive including a power supply, a 20MB ST-225 hard disk, all necessary cables, a driver disk and a manual. This version is the autoboot version, so an Autoboot EPROM is included.

Considering that 16GB MicroSD cards are now common, it’s good to see Moore’s law is alive and well in 2011.

The cabling is a straightfoward affair, with power, control and data cables to be connected from drive chassis to controller card.  The provision of a supply for the controller card is a nice touch, ensuring your Amiga’s power supply will not be unduly strained  by the new arrival.

The manual is clear, and well written, and despite the number of steps to be gone through works well, taking you through physical stuff through to low level formatting, sorting your mountlists out, mapping out bad sectors and getting autoboot working.  It’s worth noting that drives of this era typically have a bad sector list printed on the drive, but there’s no facility provided for manually mapping these out: you have to hope that the mapbad program finds them. The feeling of joy at getting away with less sectors mapped than the drive states is tinged with worry that you’ve got an unreliable drive…