SD Drive Z2
SD Card Interface for Big Box Amigas
File transfer between the Amiga and PC can be a painful task. There are various
solutions available:
- Floppy method - PC formatted 720 kB (or 1440 kB if your Amiga has a HD FDD) disk
is required -- if your PC has a floppy drive at all. Disadvantages: small capacity
and slow transfer rate (20kB/s). How to transfer e.g. 50-100 MB of data?
- 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. On the A1200, a cheap
PCMCIA card can be a working solution, however the Amiga to Windows transfer is very
slow (~100 kB/s) due to problems in the SAMBA implementation. Amiga to Linux and
Windows to Amiga transfer is working much faster.
- Removable HDD method - The system should be shut down in order to change the
HDD/CF card.
- PCMCIA CF adapter - A good solution, but limited to A1200/A600 with PCMCIA slot.
There's now a better solution for big box Amigas: the SD Drive.
SD Drive is not a slow floppy emulation, but a real, on-the-fly removable device with
excellent performance! Why to emulate a floppy if today every Amiga has lots of RAM
and WHDLoad support for almost all the stuff you ever wanted to play or watch?
SD Drive was born to solve all aforementioned data transfer problems listed 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 to 1.5 MB/s, which is ideal for copying even large amounts
of data between your computers.
You can use cards of any capacity you like, but please note that
all cards larger than 4 GB will be formatted to 4 GB.
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 five minutes! The flat cable
is long enough (52 cm) to access easily the card reader module.
On the software side only three 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 or ZIP
disk, but with much more capacity and incredible transfer rate!
To add an item to your order, please click the shopping cart icon
on the right hand side of the item's price.
The colour underneath the icon indicates the item's delivery status:
= not available, no restocking date confirmed
(Exchange rates are updated at least once every business day)
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