Basically anything you can find that still works.

A lot of drives back then were pretty loud as far as the heads moving back and forth.
You can always try using rubber washers/insulators to mount it to the case. That should quiet it down a bit.

If it is more of a whining sound, then the spindle bearings are probably dried out or dying and the drive will probably not last much longer.

I have a Conner 850MB drive (810MB after formatting) in my 486DX4-100 build, an exact recreation of a childhood system from 1995. But I'd say anything approx. 700MB-1.2GB would be a time-accurate sweet spot for capacity (Although from my experience, 1GB and up was typically found only in Pentium systems, since by 1995 new 486 systems were often sold as low-to-midrange budget builds). Can't really recommend any specific brands for a Ca. 1995 drive though, since Conner is the only brand I have any experience with from that time period.

Basically, Any IDE drive under 540mb.
should work with most older bios.

anetanel wrote:

... and the platter sound is LOUD.
I don't remember my old childhood 486 being that loud...

All HDDs from that time period were using ball bearings in their spindle motors, which do not improve acoustically with age. You will have trouble finding an HDD of that period that still "sounds like new", let alone is free of any media degradation (bad/slow sectors) or other issues.

If that doesn't faze you, the IBM DALA-3540 (540MB) was a budget single-platter IDE HDD from ~1995 that would fit a 486 build of the period well.

IDE hard drives of that time period use to costs $1 per megabyte
and ram costs $20 per mb.
These where the most expensive parts of the computer.

So a
80mb hard-drive costs $80
120mb hard-drive costs $120

Connor
Western digital
Seagate
Maxtor

Where common third party drive manufactures for that time period.
And YES, these drive do make noise.

Anything prior to Win98 gaming era, gets the CF card treatment at my place. Unless they are SCSI drives, and that is because SD-SCSI converters are too expensive. Other than that. I would say that anything in the range of 800 to 1200 megabyte are what you need to go for.

I still advice CF cards or SD cards for MS-Dos-6.22 machines. Less heat, less power consumption, faster drive, more easy to get hold of and cheaper.

I never heard of Connor drives. I guess they were not popular or even available here in Israel.
WD was the most popular brand, followed by Seagate. At least that was my impression as a kid in the 90's 😀
Quantum was a big player here as well.
Pretty sure that I had a WD Caviar in my childhood 486.

Anyway, I went on and ordered the IBM DALA-3540, lets hope it'll sound better.

I think a 1GB hard drive would be good for a 1995-esque build.

I had a Conner drive, too. It must have been an 80MB model, set up with a 40MB geometry (no type 47 in my 286), if memory serves.
Also, I think I heard that Conner was bought somewhen in the 90s. Maybe that's why it wasn't popular for very long in that decade.
By the time Win9x was standard, Conner was already a niche brand. Conner likely had its heyday during the mid-late 80s to early 90s.
From what I remember, Conner was quite a name during the DOS 5/Window 3.x days, though.
Anyway, my mind is sketchy about it, so I'm speaking under correction. 😅

anetanel wrote:

I never heard of Connor drives. I guess they were not popular or even available here in Israel.

Conner was what I would call one of the "largest small manufacturers" of drives during the early to mid 90s, although they originally started back in the 80s. Not as well known as WD, Seagate, Maxtor or maybe even Quantum, but still enough of a contributor that their drives were semi-common depending on where you looked. A lot of my Toshiba portables from that time period use Conner drives (in fact, their BIOSes are hard-coded to accept ONLY Conner drives), I worked on at least one other 486 system back in the day that had a 250MB Conner drive installed, and IIRC some of the drives used in Macs during the early 90s were rebranded Conner SCSI drives. Seagate bought out Conner in 1996, so several Seagate drives from around that time are either rebranded Conners or new models based on Conner designs.

They were a budget brand, and it really showed, especially towards the end. IIRC some models had the top cover held on by foil tape instead of screws (I THINK the 850MB Conner drive I got in my 486 is like that), and performance lagged a little bit. Anecdotally, reliability with Conner seems hit-or-miss, although a majority of the Conner drives I have personally used seemed to work fine. The one in our childhood 486 eventually developed ~120MB of bad space according to ScanDisk back in the day, but modern-day experience with my rebuild of that system makes me think perhaps it was a controller issue and not a problem with the drive itself, so for all I know the drive itself in that childhood system could have been perfectly fine. The only Conner drive I've had RECENT trouble with was a 40MB model in one of my Toshiba portables not wanting to spin up, which I attribute to aged lubricant and thus could really happen to any old drive despite brand or model. Otherwise, all of the Conner drives in my collection that are currently in use are working fine.

DX4-100 is quite powerful CPU and can run a lot of things, so if it was my build, I would go for 10-20 GB drive. If you just want the era, the most used HDD in machines were Western Digital Caviar 21200 and 21000, from a Seagate selection it would be Medalist ST3127xA or ST31720A, from Quantum Corporation it would be 1280AT or 1700AT (my most favourite by the way. The sound is just angelic 😀 ). A little bit uncommon were Samsung WN3120xxA drives or Maxtor 713xxAT drives. Everything right between 1-2 GB 😀

Conner and Maxtor were like the two dogs, fighting over the consumers choice of drives, back in the mid-90's. Up until some 1994, I never heard of anything else than Conner. First two harddrives that I owned, was conner, then one Quantum and after that Seagate. My first Maxtor was bought around 2003.

To minimize CPU usage I'd prefer SCSI HDDs.
Anything from 2 to 8 GB should be fine.

We got a DX2/66 Early '95, 420MB Conner
Mate got a DX4/100 Mid '95, Maxtor 500MB

Some time in 96 we upgraded to a 1GB Western Digital, with the 420MB demoted to slave and used as a backup drive.
That drive must of had 5 years of constant use and still going 😀

But if its quietness your after CF or SD card is better. I use a real HDD for C:\ for the authentic sounds at startup and a CF card for all my games as its quieter, faster, reliable

Disruptor wrote:

To minimize CPU usage I'd prefer SCSI HDDs.
Anything from 2 to 8 GB should be fine.

Don't expect SCSI to help in the noise department though... these were high-performance parts with even less attention to acoustics than IDE drives of the era.

chinny22 wrote:

I use a real HDD for C:\ for the authentic sounds at startup and a CF card for all my games as its quieter, faster, reliable

That's that plan too 😀

dionb wrote:

Don't expect SCSI to help in the noise department though... these were high-performance parts with even less attention to acoustics than IDE drives of the era.

My IBM DCAS was not that loud.

dionb wrote:

Don't expect SCSI to help in the noise department though... these were high-performance parts with even less attention to acoustics than IDE drives of the era.

In all honesty, I don't recall Macs from this time period being overly noisy, and they used SCSI hard drives until well into the PPC era IIRC.

krivulak wrote:

... Everything right between 1-2 GB 😀

In a 1995 Pentium, maybe. 486 were becoming budget-class by '95 and the typical 486 machine would be including lower-end components; naturally this would also extend to the HDD. That's why I suggested the 4500RPM IBM DALA-3540 above instead of the upmarket 5400RPM DPEA-31080, or indeed the original Quantum Fireballs, which were also 1995 products. I think anyone would be hard-pressed to find such expensive 5400RPM models arriving stock in a 486 box built during that time period.

Of course if it's a custom build for someone who needed/asked for a lot of and/or fast HDD space for whatever reason, the above can be disregarded, and also opens the door for SCSI drives; however the OP asked for "era appropriate" and "quieter". It is convenient that budget drives even back then tended to include fewer platters and rotated at a lower RPM.