The Squirrel: Reviewed for JAM magazine in 1995

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The Squirrel. A review for JAM by Neil Cartwright. 15 January 1995

Produced by HiSoft. RRP ÂŁ75.95, including overnight courier service. As an A600/A1200 user, are you fed up with the problems of expansion? If so then the Squirrel, a brand new piece of hard-ware, is the thing you've been waiting for. Made and distributed by HiSoft, the Squirrel utilises the PCMCIA card slot by turning it into a standard 50 way SCSI-2 connector. The device is simplicity itself. Fitting the hardware is a case of plug-in and go. What this means for the A600/A1200 user is that they are no longer bound by the limitations of IDE hard-drives, but they can now use a whole range of SCSI devices which are widely available in the PC world. And at a price which is much lower than Amiga specific hardware.

Most significantly this includes CD-ROM drives, but also back-up devices like conventional tape-streamers, the more expensive DAT drives, removable media drives, and flopticals. So the Squirrel offers a great deal of expansion but let's get down to the nitty-gritty and see how it actually performs.

I'm an A1200 user and before my Squirrel arrived I had no experience of using SCSI firsthand, but had heard a few horror stories about problems with boot-up once devices were attached with conflicting SCSI IDs. So I was a little wary.

Fortunately for me (but not for him) my friend has just blown up his Warp Engine and with it his main SCSI access. Thus he was able to lend me all his SCSI equipment so that I could test the Squirrel. This consisted of an Apple CD300 CD-ROM, an internal Archive Corporation 150 MB tapestreamer, and a 1.3 Gb hard-drive. The tape-streamer and hard-drive were placed in a standard PC mini tower. The three devices were daisy chained and the machine booted.

Initially my machine booted as normal but none of the devices appeared. At this point I would recommend reading the excellent Squirrel user manual. It tells you that on the first boot-up none of the devices will be recognised because the 'squirrelscsi.device' and software drivers have not been installed.


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