Compatibility Issues concerning SD Cards
All SDSC, SDHC, SDXC cards, which can handle blocks of 512 Byte size, are suited for the
operation in the GigaFile. Some SDSC cards with a capacity of more than 1GiB may not work
properly. This behaviour is described in detail in the section Tricks and Limits. To verify if a card is
suitable or not, it can for example be inserted into a card reader connected to a Windows PC. Open
the formatting dialogue. There is a setting, 'Cluster Size'. In conjunction with the FAT file system,
you should see cluster sizes of 8192 Bytes or less. In this case the SD card is usable in the GigaFile.
One Word about the Transmission Data Rate
With the new configware R02 an optimized management of the data transfer rate is introduced. A
measurement as in the configware R01 is now obsolete. The GigaFile adjusts automatically to a
maximum value. In the table below the data transfer rates which can be expected are listed.
Atari ST read Atari ST write Suska-III-C
read
Suska-III-C
write
TT read TT write
1200kByte/s 1000kByte/s 1800kByte/s 1200kByte/s 1800kByte/s 1200kByte/s
Table 1: Achievable Data Transfer Rates
If there are nevertheless problems which assumably are caused by a too high data transfer rate, there
is the configuration bridge TDR (see 2). If TDR is closed the GigaFile runs with reduced data
transfer rate.
Due to these optimizations, the GigaFile R02 is compatible to more hardware and robust against
critical data bus timings.
Features
The operation of the GigaFile in principle is possible at any SCSI or ACSI bus with any hard disk
driver. The ACSI bus has limitations concerning the maximum size of the inserted SD cards; the
maximum usable size is limited to 1GiB when SDSC, SDHC or SDXC cards are used in
conjunction with any hard disk drivers. To remove this limitation, the GigaFile can operate in
conjunction with modern hard disk driver (HDDRIVER) SCSI-II compatible commands. Thus it is
possible to use SD cards with higher capacities than 1GiB at full capacity. There are also limitations
of the maximum size of a partition and the maximum number of partitions of the operating systems
used (TOS, MINT etc.). Again, the detailed information in this documentation is based on the use of
a current version of the hard disk driver HDDRIVER from Uwe Seimet (version 8.45 or above). The
reason for this choice is on the one hand, the fact that HDDRIVER is the only one which has been
in active development for many years (from 1989 to the present), and on the other hand the
development of the GigaFile has taken place by intensive use and testing with HDDRIVER. The
GigaFile detects the type of the inserted SD card automatically. In principle it is possible to remove
the SD card during the operation at the ACSI port (for example to exchange data with a notebook)
and reinsert it for further use without a restart of the Atari computer.
GigaFile can operate all types of SD cards. There are no limitations during the operation if
HDDRIVER is used. SDSC cards are configured during the start up sequence of the GigaFile to
handle blocks of 512 bytes. SDHC and SDXC cards also work with a block size of 512 bytes. It may
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