Compact Flash Hard Drive

So now it is time to change the internal hard drive to compact flash. I have a 4GB card and some fun items.

- A 4GB Compact Flash,
- An ACard AEC7720U SCSI-to-IDE converter (but you can use I-O Data IDSC21-E from ebay too)
- A 68pin to 50pin SCSI converter (the TT uses 50 pin SCSI-2 standard ribbon cable internally)
- Two Molex 4 pin power to floppy power connectors, and not shown a Molex Y Power Splitter


All readily available from your local PC shop, apart from the ACard or IO Data SCSI Converters, but you can find them on eBay!


So now to assemble for putting into the Atari TT

Here we are. A new solid state SCSI hard drive perfect for my 1991 supercomputer made by Atari. Lets slip it into the drive bay.




First add some PCB standoffs.

Then lets fix it into the Hard Drive Caddy.

Nice. Now I can re-assemble the machine and fire up the hard drive partitioning tools. I has trouble using HDDRIVER which is the most recommended product, and I paid £40 for this.

In fact I had best success with ICD Pro hard drive tools, which although is no longer updated (unlike HDDRIVER) I found worked very well indeed. I may go back and try HDDRIVER in the future, especially as I wish to add some Fat32 windows partitions as well as the old Atari partitions, so that I can transfer files to and from PC by taking out the card. But I will try, and document this later. For now ICD Pro tools works well, and I believe that this is recommended for the UltraSatan SD Card reader too. But, my friends, this is cheaper and I could also add another 7 SCSI devices internally if I can fit them including

- CD Drive

- ZIP Drive

- More hard drives

- SCSI network card

- SCSI Card Reader

So I will also find a 4 way SCSI internal ribbon cable sometime, and see about adding extra internal devices. For now this will do, while I learn to use the machine! 4GB should be ok for now!