From a hard disk driver for Atari compatibles one may expect not only support for all hard disks and removable media drives that can be connected to the Atari. Additionally, it must provide high speed, data security, compatibility and convenient usage. HDDRIVER fulfills these and other requirements for all Atari compatibles. MagiCMac and MagicPC are also supported, provided a SCSI driver is installed.
For HDDRIVER data security is an important aspect. The data transferred are optionally verified in order to prevent errors when copying data. Selected partitions can be write-protected, which is not least a good protection against viruses. Important regions of a drive (root sector and boot sectors) can be protected against unintentional changes separately.
The compatibility of HDDRIVER sets standards. Hard disk drives and removable media drives with a capacity of up to 2048 GByte (2 TByte) are supported. (With the ST/STE in order to use more than the first GByte with SCSI drives an ICD-compatible host adapter like the LINK96/97 is required.)
HDDRIVER ensures a straightforward data exchange between PCs, Macs and Ataris without any additional software. In combination with MagiC or MiNT this even works with long filenames. Even creating DOS/Windows compatible media directly with the Atari is supported. Additionally, with MiNT and HDDRIVER it is possible to directly access partitions of the Linux operating system (ext2fs and ext3fs).
Accessing any IDE/ATAPI and SCSI peripheral is possible by using the SCSI driver integrated in HDDRIVER. This standardized software interface for Atari compatibles is used by a range of drivers for CD-ROM drives, CD/DVD burners, streamers and scanners.
Many users back up their data on ZIP or JAZ media. HDDRIVER supports
these drives with special features: The password-based read/write
protection can be configured, as well as the time until these drives
park their heads.
As a matter of course HDDRIVER supports any other removable drive, e.g.
drives by Syquest, phase change (PD/CD) and DVD-RAM drives, MODs,
CF and SD adapters etc. Ejecting the media is possible, as long as supported
by the device, by simply pressing a key on the keyboard (depending on
the desktop being used) and by tools included in the HDDRIVER package.
Do you run MagiC or MiNT on your Atari? In this case with HDDRIVER
you have access to more than the usual 16 partitions. All in all 25
partitions with MagiC and 31 with MiNT. With non-blocking data transfers
for drives connected to the ACSI or SCSI bus you gain speed when using
HDDRIVER with MagiC because you can work with your Atari while the data
are being transferred in the background.
A note for experts: HDDRIVER not only supports the generic SCSI driver
interface 1.01 (including the target interface) but also the complete
range of functions of XHDI 1.30. This means that applications can directly
use many driver functions by calling these well-documented software
interfaces.
Features like booting from any partition, SCSI initiator identification
and bus arbitration (for a maximum of compatibiliby with the SCSI standard),
automatically parking drives etc. can be taken for granted with HDDRIVER.
See for yourself that HDDRIVER provides numerous useful features and excellent compatibility by downloading the free demo version!