HARDWARE REVIEW: CMD HARD DRIVE by Dick Estel For a year or so I have been technolusting for what I swear is my "final" major purchase of Commodore equipment, specifically one of Creative Micro Design's large storage devices. I considered the RAMLink, the new FD 2000 or FD 4000 3.5" floppy drives, and the hard drive. Now let me admit right up front that I can't prove to anyone, including myself, that I really NEED one of these items. However, I thought I would like having the programs I use most often readily available in one of these devices, so I don't have to hunt around for the disk and keep track of dozens of floppies. After reading as much material as I could find, including the actual manual for the hard drive, I succumbed to temptation when Creative Micro Designs advertised a special price on a limited supply of 40 megabyte hard drives. I threw caution and my tax refund to the wind (East Longmeadow MA, actually), and made the plunge, and in a few weeks, I was exploring the wonders of having 40 million bytes of storage space available. Physically, the drive is three by five by ten inches in size, occupying about the same space as a 1581 drive. The front panel has four soft-touch pushbutton switches, Swap 8, Swap 9, Write Protect, and Reset, each with an indicator light. In addition there are four LED's: Power, Activity, Error and GEOS. With an external power supply, the drive is remarkably cool, despite the fact that the disk spins constantly when the drive is on. After 12 hours of use on a hot day, the top of the case was barely warm; and the power supply also stays cool. In addition to the standard Commodore serial connections, the back of the drive has a parallel port which connects to CMD's RAMLink, an auxiliary jack (not used at this time), and a connector to attach another SCSI drive. The drive can be used with a PC; in fact it is possible to have PC partitions and Commodore partitions on the disk at the same time. CMD recommends turning the drive off and on with the power switch located on the back, with continuous power to the power supply. This is to extend the life of the battery that operates the built- in clock. The manual is printed on 5.25 x 8.5 paper, and comes in a three- ring binder. The parts that are of use to me are clearly-written and well-organized, and there is a 10-page index. A significant part of the book is devoted to drive commands that are primarily of use to programmers. VERSATILE DESIGN FEATURES As the reigning kings/saviors of 8-bit Commodore life, the folks at CMD have taken a wonderfully wise and practical approach in designing high volume storage devices. With RamLink, the FD's and the HD's, the storage space can be divided into partitions and/or subdirectories of various sizes. In all cases, the user can create partitions that emulate the standard 1541, 1571 and 1581 drives. Some programs require the tracks and sectors of a disk, as well as the directory, to be laid out in a particular way. Emulation makes it possible to use these programs on the HD. For example, GEOS requires the use of 1581- emulation partitions. Even with the emulation, some heavily protected programs will not work; also some utilize hardware aspects of the drive that are not duplicated on the HD. There is also a partition type called "native," which can be configured to any size from 256 blocks to 65,280 blocks, in 256- block increments. Within a native partition, you can create subdirectories and sub-subdirectories (as in PC DOS) down to as many levels as you desire (within reason; there is a practical limit of about 40 levels, but it would usually be absurd to go beyond four or five.) The benefit of this capability is the organization it brings to your files. You could have a Write Stuff partition, with subdirectories for various categories of files, such as correspondence, reports for work, newsletter articles, and family history. In your correspondence partition, you could have subpartitions named business, family, letters to the editor, and so on. Carrying it to an extreme, letters to the editor could be divided into The Underground, Commodore World, and Time Magazine. Creation of partitions is easily accomplished with a utility called HD-TOOLS, which comes already installed on the drive (as well as on a disk). HD-TOOLS also allows deleting a partition and changing certain defaults, including the device number assigned to the drive, and the partition that is automatically opened when the drive is turned on. The creation of subdirectories is even easier; there is no special program, just a DOS command, entered in BASIC from within the desired partition. One of the big advantages of the HD native partition system is that all the blocks available in the partition are available to any of the individual subdirectories. Thus if there are 16,447 blocks free in the root directory, the same number of blocks will show free in each individual subdirectory. In contrast, partitions on the 1581 are limited to the specific number of blocks assigned when the partitions are created. Changing from one partition to another, or entering a subdirectory, is normally done with a DOS command. CMD has developed a number of special commands for the hard drive; all have two-letter abbreviations. All of them work with the DOS wedge, which is built into many programs. For example, with The Write Stuff, [CONTROL] [UP ARROW] puts you in command mode with the DOS wedge prefix @ already displayed. @CP3 would then take you to partition #3; @CD:correspondence would take you to the correspondence subdirectory. You can switch to another partition from within subdirectories, but changing to another subdirectory within the same partition requires going back to the root directory. This can be accomplished by entering the name of the root partition, but @CD:[BACK ARROW] is a short cut to take you back one level from whatever subdirectory you are in. You can also change partitions by pressing a combination of the front panel switches. This is valuable when using programs that do not allow access to a DOS wedge, such as the terminal program I use, Dave's Term. You can't do this in GEOS, but you don't need it. Pressing and holding the Write Protect switch puts the drive into Front Panel Partition Selection (FPPS) mode, causing the Activity light to blink steadily. While in this mode, pressing the Write Protect Switch sets the lowest digits (1's); Swap 9 and Swap 8 respectively set the 10's and 100's. To select partition 25, you would press the Write Protect switch six times (0 to 5) and Swap 8 three times. Each press lights up a different group of indicators. For 5 the Swap 8 and Write Protect lights are on. A chart is provided that shows which number is indicated by the different combination of indicator lights. Once the partition is selected, you exit from FPPS mode by again holding and pressing the Write Protect switch until the activity light goes off. (This procedure is MUCH simpler than it sounds; I used the drive six months before I tried it!) One of the great design ideas on CMD's large storage devices is the SWAP 8/SWAP 9 feature. My drive's default device number is 10. Pressing the SWAP 8 button instantly changes the HD to drive 8, and the existing drive 8 to drive 10. SWAP 9 of course works the same way. This change can be made from within most programs (not GEOS), greatly increasing the flexibility and convenience of the unit. For example, my spreadsheet program will not load from the hard drive. I simply load it from a 1571 set as drive 8, then press SWAP 8 and use the HD to load and save data files. Additional utilities provided include disk and file copiers, and utilities to reformat the drive and re-install the hard drive DOS. The drive comes with the DOS installed and several partitions already set up, including two LOADSTAR issues that were released for free distribution. The drive includes a built-in clock, and of course a program to set the time. This feature attaches the date and time to all files that are saved to the HD. Used with GEOS, it automatically sets the time on boot-up. The command @$=T will display a directory with the date and time of the last change to each file included. 240 DISKS IN ONE Just how big is 40 megabytes, anyway? How about the equivalent of 240 5.25" disks--around 160,000 blocks. I have well over 240 5.25" disks with "stuff" on them, but most of it is stuff I never or almost never use. There would be no point in putting most of this stuff on the hard drive, so it seems unlikely that I will fill up the drive any time soon. I know there are some people using CMD hard drives with up to 1000 megabytes (a gigabyte), but these are usually people who are running a BBS. So far the partitions I have created take up a little over 107,000 blocks; and of course, the space within partitions is not all used by any means. (My Write Stuff partition has over 11,000 blocks free.) Besides massive storage, one of the things expected from a hard drive is speed. Of course anything connected to a Commodore 8-bit machine is subject to the limits of the computer's ability to send and receive data, but users have been accustomed to a continuing increase in disk access speed--first with various fast loading programs, cartridges, and chips; and then with the advent of the 1571 and 1581 drives. Here are a few measurements, using a C128 and 1581, both with Jiffy-DOS: File type and size LOAD SAVE 1581 HD-40 1581 HD-40 58 K Write Stuff text :11 :08 :38 :29 16 K Write Stuff text :18 :10 Write Stuff 128 program :21.61 :12.36 GEOS 128 Program 1:06.09 :39.00 TWS Spellchecking 1581: 17.55 seconds HD40: 11.46 seconds REU: 4.23 seconds WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN'T Virtually all unprotected Commodore programs will work in native partitions on the HD. On my system this includes The Write Stuff, DCMR, LOADSTAR, Dave's Term (my terminal program), and the Menumaker program used to create the menus we used on our Disks of the Month. Several older utility programs that I tested can be loaded and run from the HD, but will not recognize the HD for disk-related functions. This included Omega-Q, a multiple-function utility which I use for dissolving ARC'd files. Other programs, such as Ultra file reader and Davis Directory Designer will work but do not access a second drive, greatly limiting the value of putting them on the HD. At least some protected programs that can be copied with Maverick parameters also will work in emulation partitions. One of my favorites in this category is Sky Travel, the planetarium program published in the "early days" by Commodore. A working nibble copy can be made that will work on a 1541 drive, but not on the HD. However, copying it with the parameter found on Maverick created a version that worked when copied to a 1541 emulation partition. I assumed there would be newer programs to replace the utilities that did not function fully on the HD, and I obtained an excellent menu program and a directory sort program from GEnie. The former, EZ Load Menu, is set up in the default partition, and will load any program from any partition or subdirectory, eliminating the need to have a written list of where everything is. Another plus, it runs from either 64 or 128 mode. The directory sorter, DEdit V7.1 (with separate 64 and 128 versions), is not as versatile as some of the early programs, but is acceptable for most uses. I GUESS I'LL KEEP IT So far, in six months of use and testing, I have had very few problems with the drive, and find it living up to my highest expectations. Probably 80% of my computer use is either with TWS or GEOS. For Write Stuff I set up a large native partition, with subdirectories using the various categories of files that I already had established on separate 1581 disks. So far the only subdirectory that has been further divided is CORRESPONDENCE, which is divided into COMPUTER RELATED and OTHER. As the time comparisons show, loading and saving speed is significantly improved. My other major program, GEOS, also works well on the HD, with only one problem. Although there is no access to DOS commands within GEOS, you can easily switch between 1581-emulation partitions using QUICKMOVE, a utility provided with the drive. Once opened, this program offers the choice of displaying a list of partitions, or the directory of the current disk. A click on the desired partition immediately switches you there. The directory listing can be used to copy files between partitions. Occasionally when I copy files this way, the destination partition is renamed with the same name as the source partition. This is easily remedied by renaming the partition, but once my boot partition became corrupted and I had to recreate it. (Setting up a boot partition on the HD is a bit tedious, requiring the use of Maverick v.3 (later versions won't load when the hard drive is present). Partition switching can also be accomplished from QUICKMOVE by pressing the number of the desired partition (choice is limited to 1581 partitions; no other sizes can be accessed). Using this method, plus the keyboard shortcut to close the file ([COMMODORE] Q) took 16 seconds to get from desktop to desktop. By contrast, switching physical disks took only 8 seconds with the disk ready at hand. However, when you add the time needed to dig out the needed disk from the file box, the hard drive switching time is nearly always faster. One thing I did learn by experience (i.e., the hard way) is the value of carefully planning the order and organization of partitions. Having added partitions as needed, I had GEOS scattered here and there, with unrelated items in between. Another consideration is that GEOS apparently will not reboot after a lockup unless the boot partition is #1 (CMD ships the drive with #1 containing many of the HD utilities). Ultimately I backed up everything on 1581 disks, deleted all partitions, and started over. This time I left several unused partitions between different areas for future use. Then I copied everything back to the HD. This project was worth the trouble, but no fun, and could have been avoided. Although I had some serious second thoughts about such a large investment so late in the history of Commodore computing, I am completely satisfied and very glad I did it. The CMD hard drive is amazingly versatile, and offers all the increased convenience I expected and more. I feel I have only begun to take advantage of its capabilities. I have vowed to help take Commodore computing into the 21st century, and the HD-40 should prove to be a worthy aid and companion on that journey. (From about 1995)