Tuesday, September 26, 2017

SD Drive Z2

File transfer between the Amiga and PC is a painful question even in 2017. There are various solutions available:
  1. Floppy method - PC formatted 720 kB disk is required, if your PC has a floppy drive. It has small capacity and very slow (20kB /sec). How to transfer e.g. 50-100 MB of data?
  2. Ethernet card - The cheapest interface is 80-100 USD, if You can find it for sale. It requires a TCP stack, lots of RAM, an FTP client or SAMBA. In A1200 it is a working solution with a cheap PCMCIA card, however the Amiga -> Windows transfer is very slow (~100 kB/s) due to problem in SAMBA implementation. Amiga -> Linux and Windows -> Amiga transfer is working much faster.
  3. Removable HDD method - The system should be shut down in order to change the HDD / CF card.  
  4. PCMCIA CF adapter - It is a good solution, but limited to A1200 / A600 with PCMCIA slot.
For the big box Amigas we are proud to present the solution: the SD Drive!

SD Drive external card slot

SD Drive was born to solve all the listed data transfer problems above. No need for a clockport, no need for a SPI bus; SD Drive is a complete plug'n'play solution.

SD Drive is a Zorro 2 card, compatible with all Amiga models equipped with Zorro 2 or 3 bus, including the most popular A2000/A3000/A4000 machines, running AmigaOS 1.2 - 3.9.

SD Drive offers reliable file transfer using cheap SD / SDHC / MMC cards. The data transfer rate is 1.2 - 1.5 MB/sec, which is ideal for copying even large amount of data between your computers.

There is no limitation in card size: SD Drive can utilize any size cards. All cards which are >4 GB will be formatted to 4 GB.
SD Drive Zorro 2 card with a disassembled external card slot
The installation is very simple: Plug the autoconfig compatible card into a free slot, connect the cable to the external card reader and the hardware installation is complete. It takes no more than 5 minutes!

On the software side only 3 files are required: the device driver (DEVS: directory), the mountlist entry (SD0:, copy it into DEVS:DOSDrivers) and the filesystem. The FAT95 filesystem should be available in L: directory. That's all.

No need to run UAE on the PC side to access the files on the SD card written with the Amiga; SD Drive uses a native FAT16/32 filesystem, which is directly accessible by your Windows PC.

SD Drive supports dynamic card sizing  and hot swapping. No need to reboot the Amiga to mount a new SD card. It works exactly like a regular floppy disk, with much more capacity and incredible transfer rate!

Please note, this site is not a webshop. You can order various products from our resellers (Amedia Computer France etc.). For further information please send a private message.

2 comments:

  1. Why Private message? Would be much esier if price would be public.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank You for the inquiry. Please note, this blog is not a webshop. If You need any item, please contact me in PM and I'll forward your order to the appropriate reseller.

    ReplyDelete