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[weirdami]

I have Data Flyer 500 that's got a hard drive in it and an RAM board expansion. According to the silkscreen jumper setting instructions, best I can tell, there is 8 megs worth of RAM on there. Can you experty people check out the pics I took and tell me if that's 8MB? It looks fully populated, so I'm leaning towards 8MB. I just want verification.

Anyone know how to tell the size of the hard drive without plugging it in? I can't really plug it into an A500 right now or else I could check myself, in both cases. I'm going to sell this thing, so I want to make sure I get the description right.

---->Full view picture

---->Close-up of some chips

(Don't go insane with these pictures or else you'll kill my low geocities bandwidth limit and make people post that my limit is exceded and then me post that it isn't because it will be back to normal when I check but by the time someone else sees this post the limit will be exceded again thus starting a never ending chain of replies. :-))

[weirdami]

Is this the sort of device that comes standard with 8MB RAM and 20MB HD and so maybe I don't need to worry?

[Amiduffer]

Sorry Weirdami, I never looked in mine, so I can't say. Your's looks pretty good.

[jkirk]

can't say for sure since i cannot see the ram well. it looks fully populated and as long as the jumpers are set properly then yes you should have 8mb.

afaik it did not come with 8mb by default. that is unless you bought it fully populated. i bought mine without hard drive and ram many years ago and had to populate it myself.

Anyone know how to tell the size of the hard drive without plugging it in?

check the label of the hard drive it should tell you. if not check the sectors/heads/etc and maybe you can calculate it out.

[Ilwrath]

Is this the sort of device that comes standard with 8MB RAM and 20MB HD and so maybe I don't need to worry?

Nope. They were custom orderable in any configuration. I had mine with a 105MB HD and no ram card. I added the RAM card myself (about a month later, as I learned exactly how much RAM got eaten by the resident drivers) and used standard 30-pin SIMMs that were picked up at various times and mismatched, just like yours. (Say, where did you get that card, anyhow? Did it have a HD-disable switch rigged into it?)

The hard drive itself should have the size specified on that sticker on it.

As there are 8 SIMMs on the card, I'd bet it has 8MB RAM. (The other option would be if they were 256k SIMMs, then you'd have 2MB, but those weren't common, even back then, and some of the SIMMs look "newer.")

[nDude]

Hi,

I'm pretty sure I had one of these (was a loong time ago) and as far as I remember they don't support 256kb modules so it should be 8 megs.

Ofcourse I used 256kb memory modules anyway and had to write a hack that allocated the repeated memory areas at bootup to prevent the system from crashing. It's not very likely that you've done this :-)

[Amiga4k]

Answer:
Each SIMM is 1 Meg. Bank 0 and 1 are 70ns (nanosecond). Bank 2-3 are 80ns (a tad slower). The drive is a Quantum, so the number on the tag might read 40,52,105. The number is followed by the letter S. The number is the UN-formatted capacity. Formatting takes a slight overheard.
The hard drive controller a Expansion Systems DataFlyer 500. Hard drive can be either IDE 40pin or SCSI 50pin, but I would suspect SCSI. The 16 bit RAM card is Zorro-II compliant in any Amiga Zorro slot.
Not that I have told you what it is, email me for a price offer.

[jkirk]

The number is the UN-formatted capacity. Formatting takes a slight overheard.

i used to think the same thing but it is not true. the fact is hardware manufacturers and software programmers operate under different rules for defining capacity. as a result of this practice a hard drive looks smaller than it actually is.

example 1mb = 1000 kb(hardware) = 1024 kb (software)

[Zac67]

30 pin SIMMs are easy to identify:
1 MB SIMMs have 8x xx1000 or 2x xx4400 (optionally an xx1000 for parity)
256 KB have 8x xx256 or 2x xx4256

[motrucker]

jkirk wrote:

i used to think the same thing but it is not true. the fact is hardware manufacturers and software programmers operate under different rules for defining capacity. as a result of this practice a hard drive looks smaller than it actually is.

example 1mb = 1000 kb(hardware) = 1024 kb (software)

Horse feathers. There are actually many variables, but what Amiga4K said usually works out as true. Your "kb" example is also not correct. A KB is 1024 bytes any way you want to look at it!

[Zac67]

Nowadays there are proper units/abbrevations for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte - I wonder why people don't actually use them... :roll:

[weirdami]

I wonder why people don't actually use them

Because Kibibyte is a stupid word.

[weirdami]

@Amiga4k

Not that I have told you what it is, email me for a price offer.

PMail is more funner when I get them to me.