I used a 1GB harddrive made by IBM iirc. I used the onboard IDE controller. It's a PCI 486. Hope this helps

I've got two 486's and both have on board controllers. They work with any ATA drive I plug in including a 40 GB ATA133.

However both had a BIOS limit of 8GB so any space past that was wasted

Yeah you can usually run any PATA drive. Modern drives support all of the transfer modes. I like modern drives because they are quiet with their FDB motors.

Some people here have used CF to IDE adapters. It's silent and the slow CF card write speed doesn't really impact a 486.

With a PCI 486 you can sometimes even use a PCI ATA controller card. I've had SATA in a 486. But not all chipsets/mobos implement PCI adequately and so some PCI cards may not work.

Connecting it with another PC with, say, a 1 Tb hard drive could solve most of the storage problems while keeping the hardware authentic.

My favourite storage method is using compact flash on a SCSI bus. This involves using an "SCSIDE" bridge adapter, and can be a little expensive. I have this setup on an 8086 PC. I hoped to convert my other retro systems, but I'm not wealthy enough to do it.

Why is it your favorite method ?
Performances ?

Anonymous Coward is refering to using a SCSI host controller and an ACARD AEC7720U IDE-to-SCSI (50-pin) adapter. These go for about $100-150. It essentially lets you hook an IDE CD-ROM, harddrive, or Compact Flash card adapter to the 50-pin SCSI bus on an ISA or PCI SCSI card. The CF card will be treated as a SCSI hard drive inasmuch as the host controller is concerned. You'll still be limited to the speed of the CF card. I beleive I tested it with a 200x card once and got about 18 MB/s read in Windows NT4.0.

My preferance is to use a SCSI host controller and a SCSI hard drive. Some revisions of the newer SCSI harddrives (Ultra160/Ultra320) are actually very quiet. I think I benched about 40 MB/s with these on the same 486.

The onboard PCI IDE controller on 486's is limited to PIO-4, which is unbelievably slow compared to SCSI due to the increased demand on the CPU. If you're building a fast 486, a PCI Ultra SCSI host controller will be good enough.

I'm not sure what the motherboard's PCI PIO-4 IDE controller gets in terms of speed. I benched it once with a very old WD 1.0 GB drive and think it was around 3 MB/s.

I'm actually going for a full SCSI system, but was curious of maybe better options.
I wonder if a AHA 29160 (seems to require PCI 2.1) would run on a shuttle 433 4.0 ?

SCSI is KING up until sata in terms of raw performance. I'm putting one of these in my 386/486 machine: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190542313569 Its 7200 rpm and SILENT. SCSI has the main advantage of running independent of the main cpu. So on older systems, its a bigger and bigger performance boost. For example, my 386 tops out at 1.2mb/s on Ide. however on scsi, it saturates the controller at 3mb/s. A pci controller in a 486 would probably do 10x that.

If you are using a Shuttle HOT-433, I do not recommend using SCSI on Windows 2000. There are bus mastering issues and it won't boot. A HOT-433 w/SCSI and NT4.0 should be solid. The HOT-433 is a little flakey in my opinion. A HOT-433 w/SCSI and Win98SE should be fairly stable, but I've seen some issues (repeated drive access which resembles a hang-up that eventually comes around). I beleive those issues were infrequent though.

The Ultra160 card you are refering to, I tested in DOS on a Biostar MB8433-UUD motherboard, which is also based on the UMC chipset, and it worked. However, this Biostar has no issues with SCSI bus mastering, not even in Windows 2000, so I cannot say how well the HOT-433 will do.

I personally use an Adaptec 2940U2W Ultra2-LVD card in my 486's. You can refer to the World's Fastest 486 link for my list of hardware known to work well in my UMC-based 486.

Won't running IDE DMA offer the same performance advantage as SCSI? Systems prior to Pentium with 430FX usually had PIO IDE which was indeed CPU crippling.

When I've used PCI IDE cards on a 486, I fairly sure it would peg the system's data throughput. I got around 25MB/s, AFAIR. Though I'm unsure if my SiS 497 board was truly supporting PCI DMA... The controller card claimed DMA was in use but CPU usage at 25MB/s was 100% according to HDTach.

swaaye wrote:

Won't running IDE DMA offer the same performance advantage as SCSI? Systems prior to Pentium with 430FX usually had PIO IDE which was indeed CPU crippling.

When I've used PCI IDE cards on a 486, I fairly sure it would peg the system's data throughput. I got around 25MB/s, AFAIR. Though I'm unsure if my SiS 497 board was truly supporting PCI DMA... The controller card claimed DMA was in use but CPU usage at 25MB/s was 100% according to HDTach.

Unfortunately, I haven't run any benchmarks with a PCI ATA controller on a 486. My only PCI ATA controller (Promise SATA150 TX2plus) is currently in use on my 686 Benchmark Comarison computer, which I am actively using. I jumped straight from IDE PIO-4 to SCSI without ever considering an ATA controller. This would make for a fun test though. There'd be a few ways of running it, one would be to use a hard disk benchmark program, another would be to check CPU usage and speed during a file trasfer in WinNT, and another would be to use it for everyday use and see how it "feels".

Well i got a bid on a 29160.
I'll take a 2940U2W if it doesn't work.
Now hunting for a 9.1GB 10k HDD 😀

I have a 4.3gb 10krpm drive. I'm only selling it because it wont work on a 50 pin bus.

sunaiac wrote:

Now hunting for a 9.1GB 10k HDD :)

And a pair of ear plugs?

Yeah maybe that's not that smart ^^
My velociraptor is not so noisy, but it's much more modern ...
What kind of SCSI disk would be very silent ?

sunaiac wrote:

Yeah maybe that's not that smart ^^
My velociraptor is not so noisy, but it's much more modern ...
What kind of SCSI disk would be very silent ?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/190542313569 <= these

naturally you can get them cheaper, just look for lot sales. They are 7200 rpm silent drives.

There's quite a few 36, 73, and 146 GB Ultra 160/320 drives that I've tried which were noise free. It is usually the later revsion drives which are quieter. So the first revision of the 36, 73, 146's are usually a bit louder than the later revision ones. The ST3146707 I have in my 486 right now is whisper quiet. That's 146 GB though, so you don't have to go so extreme. There are 36 GB drives which are just as quiet, but I don't have the model numbers on hand. You'll have to do a little research.

My Dell Precision Workstation 410 came with a 9.1 GB 10K Seagate drive in Dec. 1998. Track access was deafening!

Oh ok, i was actually trying to stay a bit closer to the 486 era (i did say "a bit" :p)
But I guess 36GB coudn't hurt, especially if I want to go multi OS (dos, win 2000, linux)