Technical information

© Jean Louis-Guérin – V1.2a – September 2014 Page 30 / 69
4.9 Which Hard Disk Driver Should I use
Here we will only consider PPD1x, HDD9xx, ICD655, and CBHD502 drivers used with CosmosEX,
UltraSatan, and Satan devices on Atari ST.
The CBHD502 driver is very old and do not support well the new devices designed by Jookie and
therefore it should be avoided.
If you want a free solution then you have no other choice than using ICD655. This driver is not
maintained anymore but work relatively well with CosmosEx and UltraSatan disk.
If you use your system mainly for gaming with CosmosEx, UltraSatan, or Satan devices then
PPDRIVER is an excellent choice. It is cheap and it is the only one to support correctly multiple
TOS&DOS partitions on Windows.
The most powerful hard disk driver is HDDDRIVER. It supports all sorts of ACSI and SCSI devices
and has many features not found on other driver.
4.9.1 Hard Disk Driver Summary Table
PPDRIVER
HDDRIVER
ICD655
CBHD502
Boot TOS partition
8
512MB
512MB
512MB
512MB
Boot TOS&DOS
Many
Many
No
No
Multi Boot
At boot time
Yes
No
Yes
FAT16A (32MB)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
FAT16B (2GB)
9
No
BigDOS
No
BigDOS
Removable media
Yes
Yes
Limited
?
XHDI
No
Yes
No
Yes
Maintained
Yes
Yes
No
No
Price
10 €
45 €
Free
Free
Performance
10
8
The size of the Boot partition actually depends on TOS version. The value presented here is for TOS
version bigger or equal to 1.04 and less than 4.x
9
BigDOS means support by adding BigDOS program in the AUTO folder
10
Values given here are only useful as relative performance measured with my HDTEST program
using the same SD card on an UltraSatan drive.