It’s almost been a month since my last post to this blog and a few things have happened since then.

First I got the 4xIDE’99 adaptor I was waiting for (this thing)

But while I was waiting for it I got some help and insight from a Facebook group (you know who you are and thanks again) into the available filesystems and their limitations. Which first got me thinking and eventually led me to getting some of these things:

They are able to convert back and forth between PATA (or IDE) and SATA totally independent of drivers or any software (I’ve used one of them before in my ZX Evo) .

The thing is I have quite a stack of 40 GB, 80 GB and 120 GB SATA harddrives. Which I had no use for and was either going to sell or toss out. But now with these things I can use modern harddrives in my towering Amiga. They are absolutely brilliant… uhm… that is except for one tiny little bitty thing; they are apparently completely incompatible with the buffered 4xIDE’99 adaptor.

So I had a choice to make 3 CF Cards and a DVD drive or 2 insanely huge and fast (in Amiga terms) harddrives. So I finally decided on not using the 4xIDE’99 in my tower. Don’t worry I still have the other “normal” Amiga 1200 I can use it in.

But I still liked the idea of being able to take the CFs out and popping them into my PC’s card reader. So here is what I came up with instead:

SATA harddrive hot-swap docking bays. No drawers, frames or guide rails needed. I can just turn off the Amiga and pop ’em out and into the PC as I see fit… obviously got a docking bay for the PC as well.

I rearranged the front a little bit, put a RapidRoad USB board on the accelerator and decided to connect it up to a card reader instead of the USB’s at the bottom.

The only thing I have left is to figure out why that RGB to SCART and VGA cable I had made didn’t work…

… and maybe some more stickers.But I guess that’s it… for now…