For more than 20 years Atari users have relied on HDDRIVER. HDDRIVER supports all fully Atari compatibles and numerous software emulators. With HDDRIVER you can use any hard disk drive or removable media drive that can be connected to the Atari.
For HDDRIVER data security plays an important role. The data transferred are optionally verified in order to prevent errors when copying data. Selected partitions can be write-protected, which is a good protection against viruses and accidential changes. Important regions of a drive (root sector and boot sectors) can be protected against unintentional changes separately. The exchange of removable media is detected reliably.
In terms of compatibility HDDRIVER sets standards. Hard disk drives and
removable media drives with a capacity of up to 2048 GiB (2 TiB)
are supported. (With the ST/STE in order to use more than the first
GiB with SCSI drives an ICD compatible host adapter like the LINK96/97
is required.)
Of course HDDRIVER is fully compatible with Atari's AHDI hard disk driver specification.
HDDRIVER ensures an uncomplicated data exchange between PCs (Windows XP and newer)
and Ataris without the need for any additional software. In combination with MagiC or
MiNT this even works with long filenames. Even creating Windows
compatible media with the Atari is supported. Additionally,
with MiNT and HDDRIVER it is possible to access partitions of
the Linux operating system (ext2fs).
Media can completely or partially be copied, and partitions can be saved as images, in order to be transferred to other platforms, for instance.
HDDRIVER supports ZIP and JAZ 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,
memory cards etc. Media changes are detected automatically. Ejecting 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 distribution.
Using memory cards (SD, CF, PCMCIA, ...) makes exchanging data with other platforms especially easy.
In order to provide unified access to IDE/ATAPI/SATA and SCSI peripherals HDDRIVER integrates the SCSI driver in the latest version 1.01 (including the target interface). This software interface for Atari compatibles is used by a range of drivers for CD-ROM drives, CD/DVD burners, streamers and scanners. For IDE drives HDDRIVER's SCSI driver emulates the most important SCSI commands. This means that applications can access IDE drives and ATAPI devices as if they were SCSI devices. HDDRIVER does not only support the SCSI driver interface but also the complete range of functions defined by XHDI 1.30. Applications can access many driver functions by using these two well-documented and standardized software interfaces.
Do you run MagiC or MiNT on your Atari? In this case with HDDRIVER
you have access to more than 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 data
are being transferred in the background.
Features like booting from any partition, SCSI initiator identification
and bus arbitration (for a maximum of compatibility with the SCSI standard),
automatically parking drives etc. can be taken for granted with HDDRIVER.
HDDRIVER is not only a piece of software. Besides numerous tools the HDDRIVER distribution includes a printed English or German manual. HDDRIVER is still actively developed. When there are problems or questions HDDRIVER users get support by email or in the HDDRIVER forum.
In addition to the information provided by the HDDRIVER manual you can download the technical information for the SCSI driver as an archive. The same applies for the XHDI specification.
See for yourself that HDDRIVER provides numerous advantages compared with other drivers by downloading the free demo version!