For my 486 I went with a Caviar 640 because it sounded nice. I skipped four smaller drivers simply because they were noisy rather than enjoyable.

yes there's a chance of failure but

There's always a chance of failure, and one should always have backups. Age doesn't come into it. And it's silly-easy to make and store images of these tiny drives.

Question: Did people always have HDD with their 286? I didn't go PC till late 386 when HDD were standard. At what point in the PC world did people typically switch from double-floppies to HDD?

We had the first hard disk in a 286, the XT before it didn't have one, only two floppy drives. (It had a factory option for a HD, but that would have been more expensive.)
I think when we upgraded to a 386 we also got a larger hard disk, but I'm not sure of that. It's possible that the first HD was pre-IDE (ie. MFM/RLL controller card) and the second one IDE. The first one was definitely below 100MB, the second one may have been larger.

Today I would use the largest hard disk I could possibly get to work on those systems, since there is a lot of stuff those computers can run that might fill up a smaller HD (I remember the first HD we had got full easily when installing larger games, and Windows 3 wasn't that tiny either.), and later HDs are faster as well.

I got my first PC in 1991 - 286/16 with 42MB Conner HDD. I believe HDDs were standard at least a year or two before.

Since going retro... I had one Siemens 286/10 from 1989 that had 40MB MFM hard drive. Recently I got another 286/16 that has everything on-board including ATA connectors - but I can't get any HDD to work with it - must be broken. I'll try with a standard ISA Multi I/O card when I get to it.

Like "idspispopd" said, I'd also use the largerst HDD BIOS can support.

The 286 has a working hard drive in it at the moment so that should be okay. I can't quite figure out how big it is because the BIOS reports it as a 30MB HDD but the actual disk size is around 40MB but either way it does the job. I'm wondering what HDD to put in my 386DX40, but from the responses so far, it seems everyone just puts as large as they can get rather than going for more what was "correct" for that period. I was thinking back in the days the largest HDD's for a 386DX40 would have been 540MB?

Re: Pewpewpew my rich friend had a 20MB HDD in his XT!! I'm fairly sure I took that 10MB HDD to my 286 until I got my 120MB Conner. KQ5 on a 10MB HDD didn't really leave room for much else 🙁

Hmm.. period correct by my experiences... 286 up to 80MB, 386 up to 270/340... 486DX/2 up to 540, newer 486DX/4 (with BIOS limit removed) up to 800MB.

...then comes the time you attach a CD rom drive on a 386 and voila: The cdrom has twice the storage space of your entire hard disk 😜

My first harddrive is an Amstrad PC1512 and it's 30MB

GeorgeMan wrote:

...then comes the time you attach a CD rom drive on a 386 and voila: The cdrom has twice the storage space of your entire hard disk 😜

As funny that may sound... it actully was the case. I had Quantum 340MB HDD and Mitsumi 6X CD-ROM.

I use SeaTools to limit capacity on modern SATA drives and then use a SATA > IDE adapter. A while ago I made a 500 MB drive that way. Unfortunately none of the old machines would work with it only a newer Pentium III would work with it. But it's something you can muck around with if you have time.

I think my first computer, a 386 DX, came with a 80 MB hard drive. I also remember purchasing a separate drive with around 400 MB at some stage.

Originally, my first PC (386SX-16) in 1992, came with a 40Mb HDD (that was the biggest I could afford - I used Stacker a lot 🤣). 386DX-40 was the very common CPU during 1992-1993 and they generally came with 80MB disks.

About a year and a half later, I got my additional 240MB Maxtor. When I upgraded to a Cyrix 486-33 1995, my HDD was already 540 MB, and it was already 2GB when I had my first Pentium in 1997.

And now, in my retro builds:
386SX-16: 240MB (just because it is a replica of my original first PC). I'm also looking for a 40MB ST-157A for the same machine.
386DX-40: 3GB IDE (with Ontrack Disk Manager) + 3GB SCSI
Pentium MMX: 80GB IDE + 36GB SCSI + 72GB SCSI
Pentium III: 120GB IDE + 80GB IDE + 140GB SCSI

I really dont care being `period correct`. I think when you want to build those systems, you want to have a library of games and plentyfull storage to put them on the systems.

But if you want to be period correct, i think a 60MB drive would it get done.. But if you dont want to be period correct, them iam just taken an older 486 harddrive with about 500 MB of space.
For a 386 system i would go for an till 2GB drive.. For an 486 system you really can decide what you want till 8 GB drive.

I use a 2gb SCSI drive in my 286, 386 and 486. they were all relatively painless to set up and gave way more then enough storage space. I did hit a small issue when on my 286 though. Couldn't get the Adaptec drivers to work for the CD drive. don't know if it was because it was a 286 but they worked fine in my later systems. ended up just running a IDE CD drive using VIDE drivers. I also had parity issues with certain Adaptec SCSI controllers in my 286. They kept tripping Parity check errors so I had to temporarily disable parity checking in BIOS.

I never had a PC growing up until the late Pentium 1 era. As a kid I had an Amiga 500 and a C64 so no HDD. My P1 machine though had a 1.2GB hard drive. I eventually splurged and upgraded to a 20GB HDD. felt like at the time I could never ever fill all that space up.

kixs wrote:

GeorgeMan wrote:

...then comes the time you attach a CD rom drive on a 386 and voila: The cdrom has twice the storage space of your entire hard disk 😜

As funny that may sound... it actully was the case. I had Quantum 340MB HDD and Mitsumi 6X CD-ROM.

Exactly. That's why so many games defaulted (or at least had the option) to running the game from the CD-ROM.

I'm curious to try the SATA -> IDE adapter, can you link me which one you tried Phil?

dacow wrote:

I'm curious to try the SATA -> IDE adapter, can you link me which one you tried Phil?

There are LOADS on eBay. But they all come with the same converter chips it seems 😀

I really like these ones: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/PATA-IDE-TO-SATA-C … =item2c53c2f41b

Cool can't go wrong with $3.73 purchase.. I love the "It Converts patroller ATA to Serial ATA." 😉

I guess with the newer HDD's you don't get the good old clunking of the older drives when the data is being access. Just adds to the retro feel 😀

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pewpewpew wrote:

Question: Did people always have HDD with their 286? I didn't go PC till late 386 when HDD were standard. At what point in the PC world did people typically switch from double-floppies to HDD?

286 systems typically had at least a 40MB hard drive by the time they became common, but not always. A friend of mine had a floppy-only 286 AT clone (w/CGA), but that was rather the exception than the rule.

I'd probably load a CompactFlash card or whatever working IDE/SCSI HDD I have laying around in a system as old as a 286 or 386. Although I'd imagine that with drives larger than >2GB you'd run into capacity limitations with either your motherboard's BIOS, version of MS-DOS, and/or I/O controller. Just going by memory here as I've been working with tons of Slot 1 and Socket A/462 systems, I've been spoiled by Windows 2000 Professional and huge SCSI and SATA drives 😎