Hard disk drivers

[Yippee]

Has anyone seen a pro and cons comparison of hard disk drivers e.g ICD, ASCI, PP Hddriver etc..?

[Steve]

My take:
ICD: Never tried it, old and unsupported. Good if you don't want to spend any money.
PP: Best for stock-ST's where your goal is mainly playing games and having compatibility with Pp's patched games.
HD-DRIVER: For serious users who need to manage multiple different types of interfaces, IDE, ACSI, SCSI & want support for modern interfaces like PiSCSI/BlueSCSI as Uwe directly supports and works towards Atari compatibility with modern devices.

So, if I had an 8mhz ST where I play the odd game. I'd get PP driver. For anything else, HD-DRIVER.

[rubber_jonnie]

I'd agree with what @Steve has said.

I quite like ICD if I want to do things for free, it's certainly better than the old AHDI drivers, but whilst it does have decent tools, it has limitations.

I use HDDRIVER and PPera's driver as both allow for byte swapping, which means they can be seen in both Windows and TOS, which makes for nice easy file swaps.

PPera's driver is very well priced compared to HDDRIVER, but you have to specify what interface you need it for up front, so IDE, ASCI, SCSI etc (This may have changed since I bought it, so don't quote me), whereas HDDRIVER will work with everything from the get go.

Up to how much you'd like to spend

[mrbombermillzy]

I used ICD drivers on my TT with real SCSI platter drives for years with no problem.

However, on the Mega with Satandisk, I paid for PPera drivers, as the ICD wasnt suitable.

You didnt say if you were using physical platters or a SD based solution, or SCSI/ACSI/SD FAT32/etc.

[Atari74user]

I can't disagree with many here, but it's going to depend on your use case. Personally, I have never had any issues with ICD, however what I use:

Atari Falcon - Internal IDE to CF / External SCSI SD (GigaFile)
- HDDriver because it is still supported, and my use case is mostly non games weighted towards music, DTP and demos, and it is more flexible with IDE to dual Compact Flash. However I am going to revert to ICD at some point as I want to test recording audio to the hard drive with it, as some more niche audio applications do not like HDDriver.

Atari ST - UltraSatan and SyQuest EZ135
- HDDriver because it is still supported, supports byte swapping with the UltraSatan, and is suited to my use case which is mostly non games weighted towards music and DTP.
- There are some edge cases where HDDriver doesn't work for me, so I have had to go back and use ICD, this is for my external SCSI SyQuest EZ135 with a niche Plasmec ADAS audio hard disk recorder. HDDriver and the UltraSatan are simply not compatible with the ADAS.
The same is true for another audio device, the Hybrid Arts ADAP, it's software is simply not compatible with recording audio directly to the UltraSatan with HDDriver, so I have to have another bootable SD card with ICD as my driver for this combination to work.

In summary, there is no one stop shop. Arguably you could order them, as others have said, but it just depends:

-HDDriver as it is supported and flexible
-PPera, I don't have a use for it, but equally is supported
-ICDPro as it is better than the rest (AHDI etc... from Atari) and there will be some use cases where it simply works better (from my experience)

[Badwolf]

YMMV, but:-

I use HDDriver on my Falcon and ICD on my STs.

None are perfect.

HDDriver always seems to not-quite-support the thing I want to do, but if you're using something it supports it's second to none. Its partitioning and informational utility is the best available.

ICD seems much more forgiving and supports almost everything I've thrown at it, but I'm not sure it support XHDI (needed for EXT2 or MINIX partitions under MiNT, for example -- it's a been a while, I may be wrong).

EmuTOS on the other hand doesn't need a driver and works with absolutely all combinations of everything I have.

BW

[chronicthehedgehog]

I used ICDPro for 'some time'; probably no where near as long as others; my hard drive with Atari usage can be measured in months/years rather than decades. However, I liked the tools and it felt 'pro' and reliable. It was easy to create 8 512mb partitions on a Pico drive. I also managed to create 6 FAT12 (or was it 16) 32Mb partitions that could be mounted under Linux (not Windows) easily. 32Mb partitions for transfer are not optimal but usable.

The only compatibility problems I had was when trying to run some of PPera's adaptions but that's to be expected I suppose.

A few months ago I put a monSTErbo in my STe and decided to use IDE so switched over to HDDRIVER. I find the tools OK but a *little* confusing if I'm honest. I've changed the wrong setting and made it unbootable a couple of times. But with a recovery disk/EmuTOS it was easy to recover. The only compatibility problem I've encountered is not being able to run R-Type DX. In general I think it's pretty good and of course supported.

Of course, there's also EmuTOS. It just works and mounts whatever you throw at it IMHO. The only reason I don't use it daily is that I quite like TOS 2.06

[Cyprian]

in '90 I used Hushi for my Falcon with IDE hdd, because if I remember correctly it was the fastest one.

[Yippee]

My take:
ICD: Never tried it, old and unsupported. Good if you don't want to spend any money.
PP: Best for stock-ST's where your goal is mainly playing games and having compatibility with Pp's patched games.
HD-DRIVER: For serious users who need to manage multiple different types of interfaces, IDE, ACSI, SCSI & want support for modern interfaces like PiSCSI/BlueSCSI as Uwe directly supports and works towards Atari compatibility with modern devices.

So, if I had an 8mhz ST where I play the odd game. I'd get PP driver. For anything else, HD-DRIVER.

Thank you. GemDrive works very well on my ASCISTM device, but I am going to buy PP driver because I do use PP's hard disk converted programs and I beleive he deserves support for all the amzing things he has done for the Atari ST platforms.(Also I like tinkering

[Yippee]

I'd agree with what @Steve has said.

I quite like ICD if I want to do things for free, it's certainly better than the old AHDI drivers, but whilst it does have decent tools, it has limitations.

I use HDDRIVER and PPera's driver as both allow for byte swapping, which means they can be seen in both Windows and TOS, which makes for nice easy file swaps.

PPera's driver is very well priced compared to HDDRIVER, but you have to specify what interface you need it for up front, so IDE, ASCI, SCSI etc (This may have changed since I bought it, so don't quote me), whereas HDDRIVER will work with everything from the get go.

Up to how much you'd like to spend

Thank you. I tried the ICD driver, but with it, I could not run PP'S hardrive conversion of "SleepWalker" for some reason it crashed to a black screen after loading the front game screen. GemDrive works very well on my ASCISTM device, but I am going to buy PP driver because I do use PP's hard disk converted programs and I beleive he deserves support for all the amzing things he has done for the Atari ST platforms.(Also I like tinkering