I have just lashed out £42 on a micro SD ‘Hard Drive’ for the ST - a ACIS2STM.
Sadly though, I have a TOS 1.02 which doesn’t handle HD partition management that well but I have a couple of workarounds without having to replace the ROMS for 1.04 or 2.06.
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ICD will partition and HDutility will prep the SD card in situ from the floppy in the ST. Both free.
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EmuTOS can be imaged onto the SD card in Windows with Win32Diskimager and you can mange files from Windows - but only on the first Parttion (0).
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EmuTOS also bootloads TOS2.06 into upper RAM
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EmuTOS is open source and still in development.
Cons:
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ICD on TOS 1.02 will only see up to 1Gb across several partitions, but remember that most PRGS fit on a single 720kb floppy natively, so still lots of room to work.
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ICD partitioned SD card is not readable in Windows.
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EmuTOS will run Pro24 with Dongle, but none of the usual CUBASE options
Pros:
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SD cards are cheap* and so maybe have two or three with different setups. However, the ACIS2STM device only accommodates one at a time unlike UltraSatan.
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Booting Pro24 is lightening fast and of course no swapping disks to save your work mid flow!
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Having ALL your songs and parts and utilities on one disk - even in same folder! - is great.
I have 4Mb in my ST so I can load ‘all’ the desktop ACC’s at bootup. I have relied upon Satellite for years to port ‘part’ files containing sysex patch headers into my Pro 24 performances so that I can just load and play!
In conclusion, although this addition to my setup is a breath of fresh air in using your old ST productively in 2023, a working floppy is still as important as it ever was for fallback - even if you have saved ALL your PRG’s/APPs and software onto PC hard drives/USB’s etc. I have an old Thinkpad 760 that has the swapable HDD bays (and/or FDD) and I simply load in a vanilla DOS 6.22 installed HDD and then can swap data via DOS 720 mb formatted floppy disks with the ST and from the DOS HD onto a Win98 HDD. The 760 also can handle USB under W98se with a PCMCIA USB. Oh and then is old faithful Ghostlink to PC!
I am still experimenting and finding workarounds to partition limits and so if others have info and advice would be great to hear!
my rig in action running on floppy technology a while ago here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYeczZgRVsg
*not all microSD cards will work and there is a list available, but for me the two that do are Sandisk 4Gb class 2 and Kingston 8Gb class 4
). It hat a 1 GB HDD which was sooo big back then 