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Best Hard Drive option for IIgs
- Thread starter Jinnai
- Start date
joethezombie
Well-known member
I agree with the CFFA3000 recommendation. Having both CompactFlash and USB interfaces is lovely. I ran a USB header to the back of the IIgs so I can just plug the USB stick in when transferring disk images around-- the virtual floppy image support is such a great added feature.
Note that Rich is nearing assembly for "Run#5" which may very well be the last of these produced. If you are thinking about one, it would be wise to get your name on the list.
Note that Rich is nearing assembly for "Run#5" which may very well be the last of these produced. If you are thinking about one, it would be wise to get your name on the list.
Schafeman
Well-known member
I was just getting ready to list some extra stuff... I have a compact flash/IDE expansion card that I don't use after picking up a floppy/SmartPort emulator. Comes with a 512mb card loaded with lots of different things, I think I paid $120 for it a while back. I'd take $50 if you didn't want to chance it for a CFFA3000 (which is awesome).
If the OP isn't interested I might be. Which model card is it? (There's several compactflash/IDE cards other than the CFFA, like the Reactive Micro Hyperdrive.)
All right. If Jinnai decides to pass I'm still interested if you want to get rid of it.
The only other reasonably priced option (the CFFA may be great and all, but it's essentially unobtanium unless you're willing to pay through the nose and several other orifices on eBay or wait for a year... maybe?) I can suggest looking into Jinnai, if you don't have one, is the Floppy Emu. It can emulate a Smartport hard drive in addition to floppy emulation; the Smartport emulation does an adequate job for a lot of workflows and unlike the "simple" IDE cards like the Reactive Micro one it also can do 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" disk-image-based floppy emulation. The only real downside of it is you can't easily mix Smartdrive emulation mode with having physical floppy drives online at the same time. (There are partial solutions.)
(I have a Floppy Emu myself; the reason I'm sort of interested in a dedicated hard card is because a major workflow for my IIgs is writing floppies for my other Apple II's. Floppy Emu doesn't work for that case very well.)
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I'm working on figuring out my options here, so thought it might be useful for anyone else now or in the future that may be doing the same if I lay it all out in one post. From what I've been able to gather in this thread, for a bootable drive for the Apple IIGS, you need one of the following:
1) Obtain an original Apple SCSI card and install a SCSI hard drive (or maybe a SCSI2SD)
2) Obtain a CFFA3000 with a Compact Flash card (or USB flash drive) (link)*
3) Obtain a ReActiveMicro Drive/Turbo IDE Controller and a Compact Flash card (link)*
4) Obtain a FloppyEMU and a MicroSD card (link)*
The first three options appear to be the best as you can run them along side physical floppy drives whereas due to daisy chain issues, you cannot use the FloppyEMU as a hard drive and be able to use floppy disks as well.
Additionally, since the first three options allow use of physical floppy drives, it would seem that those would also be the best options for being able to transfer files between the Apple IIGS and a Mac since the options for reading .PO and/or .HDV files (which the Floppy EMU uses) are largely non-existent from what I've been able to find, unless you are running Windows and can run CiderPress.* Is that right? (If you're running Mac OS X, you would need a classic Mac with a floppy drive to serve as a bridge between the Apple IIGS and a modern Mac.)
The alternative to floppies would be using AppleTalk so the Apple IIGS can network with a Mac that supports AppleTalk. This would work with any of the four options since it would not require a floppy drive to transfer files.
As far as an operating system for the Apple IIGS, is it best to stick with GS/OS 6.0.1 or is the non-Apple release of GS/OS 6.0.4 (link)* safe to use? The appeal of the latter would be (I am assuming) the ability to use the current actual date, which is something that's addressed in the ProDOS release (Thunderclock year table) included with GS/OS rather than within the OS itself.
If I have any info wrong, please let me know.
*Links provided for convenience. I have no ownership or affiliate relationship with any of the sites.
1) Obtain an original Apple SCSI card and install a SCSI hard drive (or maybe a SCSI2SD)
2) Obtain a CFFA3000 with a Compact Flash card (or USB flash drive) (link)*
3) Obtain a ReActiveMicro Drive/Turbo IDE Controller and a Compact Flash card (link)*
4) Obtain a FloppyEMU and a MicroSD card (link)*
The first three options appear to be the best as you can run them along side physical floppy drives whereas due to daisy chain issues, you cannot use the FloppyEMU as a hard drive and be able to use floppy disks as well.
Additionally, since the first three options allow use of physical floppy drives, it would seem that those would also be the best options for being able to transfer files between the Apple IIGS and a Mac since the options for reading .PO and/or .HDV files (which the Floppy EMU uses) are largely non-existent from what I've been able to find, unless you are running Windows and can run CiderPress.* Is that right? (If you're running Mac OS X, you would need a classic Mac with a floppy drive to serve as a bridge between the Apple IIGS and a modern Mac.)
The alternative to floppies would be using AppleTalk so the Apple IIGS can network with a Mac that supports AppleTalk. This would work with any of the four options since it would not require a floppy drive to transfer files.
As far as an operating system for the Apple IIGS, is it best to stick with GS/OS 6.0.1 or is the non-Apple release of GS/OS 6.0.4 (link)* safe to use? The appeal of the latter would be (I am assuming) the ability to use the current actual date, which is something that's addressed in the ProDOS release (Thunderclock year table) included with GS/OS rather than within the OS itself.
If I have any info wrong, please let me know.
*Links provided for convenience. I have no ownership or affiliate relationship with any of the sites.
Technically you can labor through the bare-metal bootstrapping-over-serial process, I guess? But, no, from a practical standpoint. You certainly can't run GS/OS off it.
If you really want to include every single option for "faking" a hard disk on a IIgs here's one that is bootable (into Prodos or GS/OS 6.x) and actually works decently well. But it's mildly complicated to get it running:
http://ivanx.com/a2server/
TL;DR, you need either a hardware Localtalk->Ethernet bridge or a "bridge Mac" with both ethernet and localtalk ports, appropriate Localtalk wiring, and some sort of Linux-capable computer to run the server software. (A Raspberry Pi works fine.) The software consists of a specially configured version of NetaTalk 2.x and a bundle of Apple II software that includes bootable distributions of ProDOS 8 and GS/OS (you can pick which version) and, again, since the IIgs supports booting over AppleTalk you can use this as a somewhat slow but workable hard disk replacement. (Speedwise it's in roughly the same ballpark as a Floppy EMU in Smartport hard disk mode.)
(To be clear, if you have an old Mac and the right version of Appleshare server you can set up Netboot like this yourself without needing the Linux server, but the A2Server bundle is plug-and-play and, if you have a localtalk bridge, eliminates the need to fire up an old Beige mac every time you want to use the IIgs.)
Downside of this setup is the AppleTalk drivers take up enough RAM that GS/OS 6.x is pretty useless on a standard 1.25MB IIgs. (It is anyway, really, but it's that much worse.) If you have a 2-4MB RAM card you're fine.
Thanks. I'm not necessarily looking for all possible options. I'm mostly interested in reasonable options and also ones that would be close to the authentic experience of running the machine when it was current. (And I thought it might be handy for others to list them in one post.)
Right now, I am leaning toward the ReActiveMicro card. Price isn't terrible and it seems like it may be the most obtainable.
Right now, I am leaning toward the ReActiveMicro card. Price isn't terrible and it seems like it may be the most obtainable.
Technically speaking the netboot option could be considered "Authentic" as it's something that was actually used in educational environments. So if you want to pretend you're at school...
The ReActive Micro card is probably the best option if you think you're going to use it enough, taking all factors into account. (It's *sometimes* possible to find a SCSI card for less than what the Turbo IDE costs, but I sure couldn't last I looked. And of course that's before the cost of drive/SCSI2SD, cabling, etc.) FloppyEMU is great and all but it's far slower and, as noted, doesn't mix with floppy drives. (If you happen to have one for other purposes, though, it could be worth trying it out and making sure you actually *want* a hard disk for your IIgs.) And the CFFA is just too *@#$ing hard to lay hands on.
Even if you don't boot from it I still recommend hooking LocalTalk up to your IIgs. If nothing else it's a handy way to create real floppies; using Asimov:
http://www.ninjaforce.com/html/products_asimov_docs.html
You can write disks straight off a mounted Appleshare volume. (The A2server distribution includes it.)
The ReActive Micro card is probably the best option if you think you're going to use it enough, taking all factors into account. (It's *sometimes* possible to find a SCSI card for less than what the Turbo IDE costs, but I sure couldn't last I looked. And of course that's before the cost of drive/SCSI2SD, cabling, etc.) FloppyEMU is great and all but it's far slower and, as noted, doesn't mix with floppy drives. (If you happen to have one for other purposes, though, it could be worth trying it out and making sure you actually *want* a hard disk for your IIgs.) And the CFFA is just too *@#$ing hard to lay hands on.
Even if you don't boot from it I still recommend hooking LocalTalk up to your IIgs. If nothing else it's a handy way to create real floppies; using Asimov:
http://www.ninjaforce.com/html/products_asimov_docs.html
You can write disks straight off a mounted Appleshare volume. (The A2server distribution includes it.)
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