Hello,
first of all, i am very sorry about my poor English!
I will try to explain what i have done. So, about this card: the system can now accept four of this IDE boards and, in some situations, the device driver replies how if all the cards are acting as a single SCSI chain. Look at the pictures, what the tool 'FindDevice', from the package IDEFix (i have the original disc of CacheCDFS, the version before IDEFix97'), show from the two cards tested right now! And look for the picture with the program HDInstTools (the only tool that i have found, for OS 3.1, that show correctly the size of the partitions on disk larger then 4GB.)! The good thing of a card without ROM like this (so, not capable of autobooting) is just that: the device driver, at binding time, configures the cards and, just because the card is like something virgin without driver, ide.device transforms the board in a part of a more complex system (like a SCSI chain, in this case).
Now look for the pictures with three CF installed, in a configuration already seen on the posts above; and then, more interesting, look at the partitioning of a large disk.
This HardDisk has a size of about 150GB, beyond the standard ATA addressing mode named LBA28. To do so, the device driver activates the new LBA48 mode and uses the new commands to read/write from/into the disk. This device driver can addressing sectors untill 2TB, but larger discs will be recognized and used without a problem, with respect of the limit of 2TB.
Now look at something very interesting for an Amiga user: how to partition this disk. I have done a test and used three different type of FileSystems, all stored inside the disc, into the RDB. The first partition, inside the first 2GB, is formatted with the old FastFileSystem, that has this limitations: partitions not bigger then 2GB and disc not bigger then 4GB, because this FileSystem can address sectors only inside 32bit of an address value (the new version of this FileSystem has not this limitation and uses, if supported by the device driver, TD64, NSD but i am not sure about this last, and scsi-direct). The second partition is formatted with PFS2, that i have bought in year 1998: it work ok and, to address sectors beyond the four gigabytes, it uses the TD64 commands, supported by this device driver (even NSD is supported by this device driver). Then follows a bigger partition, about 8GB, even formatted with PFS2 and it run ok! Then follows an even bigger PFS2 partition, but it fails! Seems to be to big to be supported by PFS2 (It is not a failure of this device driver).
Now the most big one! A 100GB partition (nice isn't?) formatted with PDS3, the scsi-direct version of PFS3 (aio, found on Aminet): it work ok! Wow! ...but even PDS3 has a limit on the size of a partition!
And now the last one, at the end of the disc, beyond the LBA28 addressing capabilities; it is a PDS3 partition and work ok!
That is all!
I have turned an IDE card into a SCSI-like one; i have partitioned and succesfully used a 150GB SATA disk; burned a CD into a modern DVD and installed a partition from a IOmega ZIP disc; and do not forget the CompactFlash cards that, all the three models in my hands, was correctly installed...is that enough for a modern IDE card? Ah! Remember the automatic selection of the PIO timing (between 0 and 1)!
So now, buy four of this cards; made the right setup of eight devices and show your Amiga with this 'Fake SCSI Chain Made With IDE Devices', to your colleagues and they will scream loud
- OH NO! ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE...EVEN TODAY, IN YEAR 2019!!!! -
Cheers
Stefano