I had enough time the last week of September to do a bit of testing on the new MicroDrives I bought from ReactiveMicro. I put in the IIgs one (they sell a IIe and IIgs version), and it booted up wonderfully. I copied over the entire contents of my old SCSI drive, which did not take long at all, and so far everything is working like a charm. I’ve been using it a bit for the last week now, and have had no problems at all.
I stumbled across ReactiveMirco.com early this year, and just recently bought the above mentioned MicroDrives. The MicroDrive is an IDE controller card for the IIe or IIgs that is setup to use Compact Flash Cards in place of a hard drive. I can’t vouch for the IIe one yet, but the IIgs version (in particular, the Turbo one) is simply fantastic! It is so wonderful to have my rather noisy old SCSI drive shut off now. Sometimes it is hard to believe the computer is on with the new MicroDrive. Plus the MicroDrive works very well, with an installed 256MB Compact Flash Card, broken up into partitions (since GS/OS cannot handle partitions larger than 32MB at a time). As for overall speed, it is somewhat faster than using my old SCSI drives. I need to play with this thing a lot more, but for now, I’m more than satisfied with this new piece of hardware for my old Apple IIgs. For anyone out there with a working (enhanced) IIe or IIgs, I would highly recommend the MicroDrive!
Thus, at this point, the IIgs is officially in the UC ’10 display. I will need to do some more work on it, and see about adding a few games, but the system is in for sure!
Now all I need to do is get the IIe enhancement chips so I can get the IIe MicroDrive up and running.
MicroDrive (IIe version) – Loading up the IIgs MircoDrive
Can you tell me how you transferred your files to the microdrive cf card? I have ciderpress and purchased the iie microdrive and have no idea how to copy my images over to the card..oh, and the card I have came pre-formatted with the necessary utilities for the iie, so all I see is a huge list of files when I mount it…no folders etc…to put my images into.
Any tutorial would help greatly. Thanks.
I’ll be honest in that I have not really used the IIe card since I bought it last year. I just tried it once and that was it (won’t be using it this year, as I’m just using a few floppies for the show). If it is similar to the IIgs card, I simply copied files over, but with GS/OS though. I would think that any copy utility would work, or check out their instructions that came on the CD. Otherwise, simply contact the folks that sell the unit. They respond quickly to emails (they did last year).