I'm pretty sure my Dell XPS M1730 laptop has an SATA HDD with a tiny connector. I had to remove it once before shipping the laptop to have the screen replaced.

Where the hell do you have 80-pin IDE plugs??

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Where the hell do you have 80-pin IDE plugs??

I think I meant Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA cable? 😉

Those are still 40-pin, they just have 2 wires for each pin for better signal quality or something.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html 😀

swaaye wrote:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html 😀

Hehe, honestly swaaye, as I was editing my reply with that very webpage link in it, I saw your re-edited reply in my "preview thread" box! 🤣

We have a special mental link, RG100. 😉

As for adapting a laptop HD to a desktop system, you can use one of these, and hook up a regular 80-conductor IDE cable to that. It'll run at whatever ATA speed the hard drive supports. Not that higher ATA speeds would matter much anyway, a small capacity, low RPM drive like that probably isn't going to do much more than 33MB/sec .

Do keep in mind that a 4200RPM drive is going to be ungodly slow, not just in transfer speeds but in general responsiveness as well. You do not want to use that thing as a boot drive, especially if you're going to be running a modern OS like XP on it.

I was hoping that this 4200 RPM 2.5" HDD would be OK for a Win95 or WFWG 3.11 or DOS 6.22 boot drive. For Win98, I will use a regular desktop 7200 RPM 3.5" HDD. When I get this 2.5" HDD up and running, I could run a speedsys.exe test, as this utility has a Full HDD test.

Yeah, it should do OK for a small OS like that, where there's not as many little files to load on boot. It'll at least be better than the old PIO-mode drives that were used back in the 3.11/95 era.

I got the HDD up and running, and you're right, it is rather slow. I did a couple of speedsys tests (fast and full), and the results were not impressive. I've got a minor technical problem here, so I couldn't upload the speedsys screenshot(s), but the fast HDD test score was only 507. The low idle noise was superb, but the seek noise was about the same as any other good modern desktop HDD.

I tried plugging the 3.5 to 2.5 adapter cable in to the Asus P2B mobo's integrated IDE port, but the mobo's BIOS HDD detection feature froze. The HDD is 80GB, and the mobo's BIOS is only 1012, so maybe I need to get the latest beta BIOS? Anyway, I used an Abit 66 speed PCI IDE HDD card instead. Unfortunately, this Abit HDD card could only see the HDD as a 10GB drive, not 80GB, but at least it didn't freeze, and it also allowed me to use the HDD.

I installed Windows 98 on to the HDD, and the whole process wasn't too slow. Unfortunately, the Abit HDD card shows up as a yellow ? symbol in the system control panel section, and I haven't got the driver for it. I had a quick look on Abit's website, but couldn't find it. This doesn't seem to cause any problems, but I did notice one thing - if I shut down Win98, then power on the PC again, scandisk pops up telling me that I should shut down the PC properly, and then proceeded to check the HDD.

My very quick conclusion is that getting a 4200 RPM 2.5 inch HDD may have been a mistake. Modern single platter (eg 80GB) 7200 RPM 3.5 inch desktop ATA IDE HDDs are both fast and quiet. (But the problem with this is that those specific types of HDDs are getting rare, in terms of buying them brand new from online retailers for instance.)

Perhaps a 5400 RPM 2.5 inch HDD would have been a better choice?

Edit: Please see my 2nd post below - I've improved the HDD test score from 500 to 900.

retro games 100 wrote:

Modern single platter (eg 80GB) 7200 RPM 3.5 inch desktop ATA IDE HDDs are both fast and quiet. (But the problem with this is that those specific types of HDDs are getting rare, in terms of buying them brand new from online retailers for instance.)

Maplins still list 40gb and 80gb IDE 7200rpm 3.5" drives.

ratfink wrote:

Maplins still list 40gb and 80gb IDE 7200rpm 3.5" drives.

You're right, they do -

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=97409

Curiously, these 40 & 80 GB HDDs are simply described as "OEM" - no specific technical information about them appears to be available. I'm suspicious! 🤣

I've made some "adjustments", and my previously reported speedsys fast HDD test score of 500 has now been improved to 900. Basically, I removed the Abit 66 speed PCI IDE HDD card. But I couldn't plug the HDD back in to the Asus P2B mobo's integrated IDE port without using Seagate's SeaTools for DOS. Using this free download utility, I adjusted the HDD's space capacity from 80GB down to 8GB. Then, I plugged the HDD in to the mobo's IDE port, and the mobo's BIOS HDD detection facility didn't freeze this time - it found the HDD successfully, with the limited 8GB size.

So, running the speedsys fast HDD test gives me much better results. Perhaps this could be improved, if I remove the basic adapter "40 cable", and replace it with a 2.5 -> 3.5 adapter "block" which will then allow me to use my own HDD cable - a faster "80 cable".

The P2B should have no trouble with drives up to 128GB, I had a 120GB in my P2B-DS for awhile and it ran fine. I'm not sure what version of the BIOS is required for that to work, though.

Also, a proper 80-conductor cable shouldn't make a difference, since your IDE port is only DMA/33 anyhow. Though, I do have my suspicions about the quality of the adapter cable you have... it would still probably be worthwhile to get a separate adapter board and use a regular IDE cable, even if you don't use an 80-conductor cable.