joska

You only speculated in possible write issues, but it's a valid point. I have tested some ATA<->SATA adapters, none of these works with my Ataris at all and it turns out that they don't support PIO. There could be ATA<->SD-adapters out there with the same shortcomings, but all the ones I've seen so far are based around the same controller and work perfectly fine with our ancient hardware. My personal experience with these adapters from various sellers is that they work very well with retro hardware (Falcon included) with no problems at all. I would not have used them for 10 years if I lost data using them.

Sorry, I meant 2.5". Looks like I can't edit my post. No, what I wrote is correct. Any good quality SD-card bought the last 10 years will be class 4 or higher. I have yet to find a card that does not work in the IDE<->SD-adapter I linked to. I have been using that exact adapter with ST's, STE's, Falcons, Firebee and Amigas since 2011 without any issues. Have used cards ranging from an ancient 32Mb card (still in use in one of my STE's) to 32Gb SDHC cards (Firebee), all of them just works. Have bought all of these cards locally in my little town, have not found anything less than class 10 cards in the shop for many years now. Speed is not an issue in a Falcon, any class 4 or 10 card is faster than what you can squeeze through the Falcon's IDE. A Falcon with heavily accelerated bus may be able to exceed the speed of a class 4 card though. My Firebee was capable of around 8Mb/s on the IDE port, I needed class 10 cards for that. CF-cards were not any faster. The only downside with the adapter I linked to is that it use Cable select and not Master/Slave, so it needs hacking if you want to have two devices on the Falcon's IDE bus. However, in my Milan I have another IDE<->SD adapter (40 pin) which does have Master/Slave-jumpers and work perfectly fine with a second device. With SD you don't have to search for the correct card, they all just works. I have not seen CF-cards in local shops for years, in the past you could buy them in photo/camerastores but nowadays you have to order them. And they cost 4 times as much as SD-cards of similar quality and capacity (Sandisk Ultra 32Gb SDHC - NOK79. Sandisk Extreme 32Gb CF - NOK348). There is IMO only one good reason for choosing CF over SD on a Falcon - if you already own one it would be cheaper than SD due to the lower cost of the IDE adapter.

Thank you! As long as the drive is OK any 3.5" IDE drive will work. But as already pointed out, IDE drives are old now and may not be that reliable. That said, I'm still using a 15 year old 40Gb drive in my Milan and it's working perfectly. I do have good backup routines though But - again already pointed out - there is no reason to use drives with our old hardware, except maybe for nostalgia. I don't see any point in CF-cards (expensive, hard to find, unreliable with Falcon) or IDE SSD's (hard to find, non-removable media, small size usually) either. A cheap IDE<->SD adapter (like this one https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/163522346147?hash=item2612b0fca3:g:3W8AAOSwws5cVg5A) and a good quality SD card is faster than the Falcon IDE and very reliable. Have been using this solution for some 10 years now in many of my retro computers and have yet to experience any problems or data loss.

Why drive a 1968 Camaro when you can drive a 2017 Camaro? Same question I use MiNT every day. But on real hardware, not a simulation. To me that's a huge difference.

It could never had made that jump. Atari never had the resources or visions to create and develop a rich OS, neither did they provide developers with usable tools. The result was that a major part of ST software was developed like it was an 8 bit. Developers invented their own solutions to stuff the OS and dev-tools should take care about, but didn't. Writing applications for GEM is hard, much more work than writing the same stuff for Windows or MacOS. And the developer tools - like TOS itself - never progressed. The result is software that's so tied to the hardware that jumping away from the basic ST cause big problems for the users. Remember that Apple - who were big and filthy rich - barely made it. A small company like Atari with the philosophy of never spending a dime never had a chance.

Whether the Amiga has survived or not is debatable If it did survive, it's despite of the PPC, not because of it. Amiga today is still mostly about 68k. The move to PPC was a failure. The Amiga community focused only on the hardware, but failed to realize that 99% of the effort would have to be put into software. It's the software that brings the system forwards, not the hardware. Why do you think the Vampire is such a big success in the Amiga world? Because it combines two things - raw speed AND backwards compatibility. If we ported TOS+MiNT to ARM or Intel today, there would be two major differences: 1 - Much faster hardware. 2 - A lot less software. Who will write the new software that exploits the new hardware?

The Milan has four PCI-slots. It also (optionally) has a 060. The main difference between the Milan and MilanII is that the MilanII was an ATX design, not AT like the Milan. The MilanII was finished and prototypes made, but it never made it to the market. Anyway, I've had my Milan060 for more than 15 years now, and while I really love that machine I have to say that going in the same direction with a new piece of "Atari" would be a big mistake. First of all, PCI has been obsolete for years. Secondly, going that route means having a GEM-only machine. Forget about running any sort of legacy software that's not pure and clean GEM. So no cool pixelpainters, no music applications, no games, no demos. Just "business" The Milan is the best "GEM-machine" out there though. Rock solid and very, very stable. I've spent thousands of hours with PureC on that machine the last 15 years I also have a Firebee and it's pretty much "just" a GEM-machine too. A lot faster than the Milan, but also a lot more fragile. As a new "Atari" I think it has failed. I don't think people realize how backwards compatible new hardware must be to use legacy software in a stable and usable way. Even when using a TT or Falcon you'll quickly get in trouble.

Please add me to the preorder list for a cased cart.

Exactly, which is what makes it interesting

There is an Atari logo on the PCB.

Interesting piece of hardware. It does look like an ACSI->SCSI card, but I did not know that Atari made such a thing as early as 1985. Also, it does not have an ACSI through-port which IIRQ all Atari harddrives had.