4 ms·

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.

• jacobush 8y ago
  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?!)
  • puzzle 8y ago
    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 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?
    • jacobush 8y ago
      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...
• zepearl 8y ago
  Yes, you're right - it was the A590, thx!