Anyone fitted an SSD in their XE?

Hi folks,

After a long time of (sporadically) trying to get my A1XE back working and damaging HDDs, I'm thinking of going down the road of a SIL 3114 PCI card and an SSD.

Has anyone gone down this road? Areb there any pitfalls?

@OldAmigan

I fitted a SIL 3112 and a OCX Vertex SSD and it works great for me. No issues that I can recall - just worked :)

On the other SATA connection I fitted a SATA -> PATA converter and a DVD drive. I went with a PATA DVD because I had it lying around and also I could get audio out going to the motherboard.

Never had any issues so far.

@musashi5150

Thanks, musashi5150.

I've decided I'm going to first try a PATA - SATA adaptor and see how it goes.

A number of people over on AW seem to have had good results with SSDs.

Didnt have any SSD the time i had XE. But i do have one in my X1000 and works ok.

@Kicko

Did you have to do anything special to get it to work?

I've had ssd in sam440ep/460 and x1000. All working as expected. Just treated like any other hd.

@musashi5150
Quote:
OCZ but I would know, I did the same. I've had it a few years now.

@oldamigan

Like every other harddrive i used. Install the same way. But i did change blocksize to 4096 in mediatoolbox as if i remember right its the native way for ssd. I used 512 before and it worked too. It got better speed while using os4 but the boot time isnt better. I use SFS2 as filesystem for most partitions except the first boot (ffs2 i think, so my x1000 would boot)

@Kicko

Someone over on AW suggested I might still have to use a HDD to boot from.

Seems strange but I wouldn't know. Did you find this?

@OldAmigan

No, that's nonsense.

@OldAmigan

I was, as stated, about to buy a SATA converter and SSD or HDD but I saw a post about DOM (Disk On Module) drives. These are essentially a flash card or SD or whatever in a module with either a PATA or SATA connection.
The upshot is, I bought one (64Gb) and plugged it on to my on-board IDE connector and installed OS4.1FE onto it.

It didn't boot!!!

After a few minutes, I saw that, as usual, it hadn't recognised the SLB.

I guess my brain woke up at that so I booted from the CD and copied the SLB from the CD to Sys: Libs and rebooted - success!

I have no idea why I never thought of that before but I also have no idea why, after setting up the HDD in Media Toolbox, it wouldn't see it anyway.

Really, I know that it's long been assumed that Amiga users should be a bit more computer savvy than most but why shouldn't the OS installer take care of that?

@Old Amigan

I've now booted and rebooted my A1XE several times, left it switched off for a couple of days then rebooted and so far, no problems.

I've also fitted a second RAM module, so I'm running on 756Mb of any-old-RAM without problems. The battery is quite old, maybe a couple of years and still no problems.

I'll now start to refit the PCI boards I used to have - SoundBlaster, Sil something-or-other and move the graphics card (a 9250??) to the high speed slot and see how it all goes.

@OldAmigan

Keep us updated on resurrecting the lady

@OldAmigan

Quote:The slb belongs in two places: The RDB and SYS:L - not in SYS:Libs.

It does sound quite strange if your machine started booting after copying slb to SYS:Libs - maybe that was just a coincidence and it would have booted anyway after a few tries?

And I'm pretty sure the slb has always been in SYS:L after a fresh installation - in fact, if it is so on the CD, it will also be there on the HD, as the CD contents (under System) are more or less just copied to the HD, followed by some customizations.

Installing it in the RDB has to be done by the user in Media Toolbox, though.

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Sorry for the slow reply but you are,of course, correct. I copied the SLB over to, first of all Libs, then realised my mistake, then to System:L.

My mistake originally was to rename DH0: to System: after I had told Media Toolbox to copy SLB to DH0:

For ages, I've had to watch my A1XE thrash the HDD trying to find the SLB. Or if I've powered down, I've probably crashed the heads into the platters.

Nice to have the old girl running again. Just got to rebuild everything now!