While hard disk drives for Macs and PCs are easily come by, there's less choice when it comes to the Atari ST. Analogic have established themselves as one of the leading companies when it comes to servicing Atari STs, but they also market a few useful Atari accessories, including Protar Profile Series II hard drives.
The model sent for review came housed in a substantial metal case finished in Atari grey and fitted with a 50Mb drive. The case is quite large, so it could double as a monitor stand, and the internal wiring can accommodate an additional drive running from the same power supply. Because the Atari doesn't use SCSI, the drive comes with two ACSI sockets, the ACSI connecting directly to the ST's hard disk socket via the included cable.
The drive is already formatted and set up as the boot volume, but because of the rather bizarre way in which STs normally handle their hard drives, the drive is split into four separate partitions, each one appearing on the desktop as a separate drive. Drive C is set up as a small boot partition, with the other three partitions dividing the remaining space equally. When powered up for the first time, only Drive C appeared on the desktop; the others must be installed, using the Atari's Install Disk menu, and then the desktop must be saved. And that's it. Having several partitions means that you can keep various types of data separate so you could have, for instance, all your MIDI stuff in one partition and your word processing stuff in another. For hard disk recording, where small partitions are a problem, the recording program usually gets around this in software.
Once installed, the drive worked flawlessly, and without undue fan noise — which is exactly as it should be. And when you switch off, there's no need to worry about parking the heads because it's all done automatically. Drive formatting and management software is included with the package, and unlike some ST hard drive support software I've seen, is easy to use; the manual is both straightforward and clearly written.
If you don't use a hard drive, you have no idea what you're missing. Everything loads so much more quickly, there are no floppies to get lost (other than your backups), and it's a lot easier to keep your files organised. Maybe this doesn't sound quite as exciting as a new synth, but it could do just as much for your creativity. Analogic are currently updating their prices, so we can't give you an exact price for this drive. The good news is that, though its last price was £249, including cables, software and delivery, the new price could well be lower.