I dunno, maybe I'm just a cheap bastard. I would hate to "waste" a nice, big, modern SATA drive on one of my legacy systems. Used sub-127GB ATA66/100/133 drives are incredibly cheap on eBay or elsewhere and they just work without any messing around. Heck, even NOS is really cheap if you're patient. If you raid recycling centers, you can probably even get them for free.

I've got six BNIB NOS 3.5" drives in storage and another six used 2.5" drives. Really, unless they die of old age and disuse, I should have enough for the rest of my life.

... and if they do die of old age, I'll be looking forward to the results of Phil's SD card experiments with great antici... pation!

Fair comment!

And not everyone used their drives for all sorts of projects, so I might be a special case. If I was building 10 or so retro PCs, I would also not use modern 2 TB drives 😀 But one day I work on a DOS project, the next I do something with Windows 7. So I love the flexibility that SeaTools and SATA to IDE adpaters offer.

So far I tried the SD adapter with various cards, had no issues at this point. But I haven't done any proper benchmarks and haven't used it with a range of systems, because there might always be some issue that creeps up. But what is new is that prices for SD adapters are now much better. A few years back, they cost more than a CF card and a CF adapter, that has changed now. I can buy SD cards at the super market and post office whereas CF cards are specialist products that I need to order in.

Well, I don't have an FDD in my current retro PC, so I plunk the HDD in a SATA dock and use Virtualbox instead. This way, I also don't have to worry about floppies being in good condition or not. The ability to use a SATA drive makes this very simple and straightforward.

Interesting...

So you install Windows through the VM onto the USB > SATA drive. And then put the drive into the retro machine?

I like that idea!

This is specifically for DOS and mainly to utilize disk images for booting and installation without having to use physical media. It would have been almost impossible to get my PC-DOS 7.1 (available for free by IBM in their server toolkit) image running without using this method.

The layout is like:
Virtualbox -> VDI to physical drive -> eSATA dock -> Seagate drive

The hardware isn't the same of course, but it's an excellent method for copying data around.

I've seen it exist some IDE to SDHC one with their own ICs and eprom. Considering how fast SD are nowdays (I've seen today some 150Mb/s... or even 95 read and 90Mb/s write), could these be even better for a Win9x build? Are they still limited from writing speed?

Writing speed, especially small files, will always be a bit of a weak spot. And I don't know what writing speed is acceptable, or at what point do you actually notice it.

IMO reading speed is still much more important.

Regarding transfer rate, on a Slot 1 system you are limited to 33 MB/s anyway, so it's not a big deal. The biggest difference IMO is the non existing access time compared to traditional disks. A time period hard drive doesn't stand a chance and certainly feels sluggish compared to flash type storage.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Writing speed, especially small files, will always be a bit of a weak spot. And I don't know what writing speed is acceptable, or at what point do you actually notice it.

IMO reading speed is still much more important.

Regarding transfer rate, on a Slot 1 system you are limited to 33 MB/s anyway, so it's not a big deal. The biggest difference IMO is the non existing access time compared to traditional disks. A time period hard drive doesn't stand a chance and certainly feels sluggish compared to flash type storage.

Thank. On my K6-2+ I'm actually using a very old 6.0GB runs good but not really fast.

IMHO the biggest issue with SD -> IDE adapters might be wear leveling. Windows 9x writes to the HDD far more than DOS, and I'm not sure cheap adapers would provide the extra logic.

alexanrs wrote:

IMHO the biggest issue with SD -> IDE adapters might be wear leveling. Windows 9x writes to the HDD far more than DOS, and I'm not sure cheap adapers would provide the extra logic.

Can this be reduced by having 512 MB RAM and disabling the page file? And with modern SD cards, is wear levelling really such an issue?

philscomputerlab wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

IMHO the biggest issue with SD -> IDE adapters might be wear leveling. Windows 9x writes to the HDD far more than DOS, and I'm not sure cheap adapers would provide the extra logic.

Can this be reduced by having 512 MB RAM and disabling the page file? And with modern SD cards, is wear levelling really such an issue?

With cheapo chinese ones? I'd not doubt it. Even branded ones have limits. Also having 512MB of RAM wouldn't really help when what you are trying to setup is an early Socket 7 or 486 with low cacheable limits. I'd like to know if these adapter chips can do 8-bit IDE, though, as something like a "XTSD" might be more practical nowadays than a "XTCF" card. Also, are SD cards through these adapters recognized as fixed disks or removable ones?

I have just received an IDE -> SD card adapter that sits on a rear bracket and has a 40-pin IDE connector on it.

So far I have only tested it with my 286 w/ 16-bit ISA IDE controller (and XTIDE BIOS) and it's the only thing that works with the IDE controller other than a real IDE hard disk. All the CF adapters and IDE -> SATA converters I've tried do not work with this IDE controller (but they do work with Slot-1 systems.)

I haven't tested the speed yet but it certainly seems like it is not a bottleneck.

XTIDE appears to report the drive as a fixed disk, and if you remove the SD card the drive stops responding. Even if you reinsert it immediately with no disk access in between, on the next disk access it comes up with "drive not ready, abort, retry, ignore". Annoyingly resetting the machine (cold boot) doesn't get it working again, I have to power cycle the machine after changing SD cards. I presume this is a limitation of the XTIDE BIOS, not supporting removable hard disks.

I expect most of these problems are due to the old ISA IDE controller. If you were to use it on a newer ATA33+ controller it will probably work much better. The XTIDE BIOS appears to support 16-bit controllers in 8-bit slots, so I am guessing this would work but as yet haven't tested it.

Malvineous wrote:

The XTIDE BIOS appears to support 16-bit controllers in 8-bit slots, so I am guessing this would work but as yet haven't tested it.

I use a Prime2-based 16-bit IDE controller in an 8-bit slot on my turbo XT clone. Works fine with my 512MB CF card.

PCBONEZ wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

Thanks all of you for the well intended suggestions, but they just won't work for me personally. I use boxes that just fit the s […]
Show full quote

Thanks all of you for the well intended suggestions, but they just won't work for me personally.
I use boxes that just fit the storage cabinet I use for drives. Plastic tubs don't fit so well and would result in a loss of storage capacity.
Stacking on shelves doesn't work well when you have something close to 100 drives to store. Also it makes finding a particular drive or model more difficult.
And I've been around long enough to beware of the bottoms of boxes opening up on me. Been there, done that.
Honestly - Thanks. - I'm sure your suggestions will help other people with other situations.
.

Anyone other than tayyare interpret that as an insult?

Absolutely not.

The way I interpret things here is that the suggestions you received seem to you like suggestions one would give a n00b, so to say. You seem to suggest these "newbie" tips are things you already tried and done a million years ago (and imo this is very obvious in your other messages on Vogons here).

You seem like a person who thinks his solutions are the best, but you don't fail to actually mention this so to me this isn't a cause for me to get insulted either. You seem to simply state thing as you think they actually are.

I really don't see any insult here and I was the actual person who suggested the "lift boxes from the bottom only" hint in the first place and I don't have the slightest feeling of insult or whatever.

One could argue that it's not the most diplomatic way, but imo it's definitely not an insulting way either and frankly, why would one even bother debating this? 😜

And ftr, my native language isn't English either.

Tetrium wrote:

Absolutely not. […]
Show full quote

PCBONEZ wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

Thanks all of you for the well intended suggestions, but they just won't work for me personally. I use boxes that just fit the s […]
Show full quote

Thanks all of you for the well intended suggestions, but they just won't work for me personally.
I use boxes that just fit the storage cabinet I use for drives. Plastic tubs don't fit so well and would result in a loss of storage capacity.
Stacking on shelves doesn't work well when you have something close to 100 drives to store. Also it makes finding a particular drive or model more difficult.
And I've been around long enough to beware of the bottoms of boxes opening up on me. Been there, done that.
Honestly - Thanks. - I'm sure your suggestions will help other people with other situations.
.

Anyone other than tayyare interpret that as an insult?

Absolutely not.

The way I interpret things here is that the suggestions you received seem to you like suggestions one would give a n00b, so to say. You seem to suggest these "newbie" tips are things you already tried and done a million years ago (and imo this is very obvious in your other messages on Vogons here).

You seem like a person who thinks his solutions are the best, but you don't fail to actually mention this so to me this isn't a cause for me to get insulted either. You seem to simply state thing as you think they actually are.

I really don't see any insult here and I was the actual person who suggested the "lift boxes from the bottom only" hint in the first place and I don't have the slightest feeling of insult or whatever.

One could argue that it's not the most diplomatic way, but imo it's definitely not an insulting way either and frankly, why would one even bother debating this? 😜

And ftr, my native language isn't English either.

Thank you for your input.

Hey tayyare, that was not an insult. I was actually really thanking him.
.
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