Hello all,

I came across a working (no bad sectors!) Seagate ST 412 10 meg MFM drive.

Here's a quick unscripted video I took with it/about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84M_E8xw8Ss&feature=youtu.be

I ran it with a 286 motherboard quicknick traded with me a while ago, which came all the way from Romania. After a quick Dallas RTC battery conversion, I was able to use it with DOS 5 and Windows 3.0 (and little room for anything more). It's configured with 4Mb SIPPS and a 1Mb TSENG video card.

So this whole thing got me thinking - I have several AT class computers, and several types of storage. Why not do a comparison?

For systems I was thinking:

-The mentioned 286
-a 386 SX 16 with 4 Mb RAM (or an SX 20 with 5Mb RAM, which can be reduced to 4 Mb)
-a 486 DX2/66 with 32 Mb RAM (I could bring it down to 4 Mb for comparison purposes)
-a Pentium 166 (VX chipset) with 16 Mb RAM

The media:

-Seagate ST 412
-Quantum ProDrive 540AT
-Chinese IDE SSD (256 Mb)
-512 Mb Transcend CF card
-Fujitsu SCSI 256 Mb

Thing is, I don't want to disturb what's on the disk, so I was thinking of making a DOS 6.22 boot disk with some diags on it (sysinfo, syschk, some others) and trying out each type of drive in each system. Any suggestions to make this as streamlined, accurate, and easy for me as possible?

Suggestions welcome.