I like to use microdrives in my retro computers. Somehow the fact that they use old school rotating platters and magnetic media makes them in my mind a better fit than CF cards. And even though I've used CF cards for many years I'm still doubtful as to their long-term potential for storage, I've seen catastrophic failures of cards where all the contents was lost at once (not that those don't happen with hard drives, mind you). Plus I have at least one system that doesn't play nice with CF cards (whatever CF card I use with it, it quickly accumulates many corrupt files even if all I do is read from it), but is very happy with microdrives.

So no, microdrives are far from useless as far as I'm concerned. I'm often looking for deals on them, as I need more.

OT: I've noticed that some of the newer USB drives, if you open them up, use hard drives with native USB interfaces. No SATA at all. It's USB all the way through.

chinny22 wrote:

focusing more on the undesirable side then useless. -Small capacity HDD's, I still like the OS installed on a HDD rather then CF […]
Show full quote

focusing more on the undesirable side then useless.
-Small capacity HDD's, I still like the OS installed on a HDD rather then CF cards, It just sound wrong otherwise, but I wouldn't really bother with using anything smaller then whatever that PC maxes out (6GB and 8GB for my earliest PC's) accept I already have the smaller drives.

-CD Drives, Again I use them as I have them but if I actually had to buy one I'd get DVD instead.

-Floppy Drive, 50/50 on this, if I actually need to use a floppy for anything then a 1 off file copy I'll swap it for a gotek. but still has a certain nostalgia element to it.

There is nothing wrong with small capacity hard drives..till 100/ 300MB could easilly used in XT / 286 systems.. I would prefer above 540MB for an 386 and 4 / 6GB for a 486 class machine..

10, 20, 30, 40 GB can easilly used for pentium class systems *depends on the support of the motherbord.. Most will do 20GB at least..

60, 80, 120 GB can be used for an Pentium III class windows 98se machine..

160, 200, 250, 320 for an windows 2000 machine.

250, 320, 500, 750 ,1TB, 1,5TB could be used for an windows xp / windows vista / windows 7 machine..

I really dont think that any drive would be useless..

Cyberdyne wrote:

Modems(Absolutely useless!), CD-ROM(Even my 486DX33 has an IDE DVD Writer) drives, radio cards(Why??), TV tuner cards(Mainly analog...), PCI sound cards(Well i may get different opinions here 😁)

I actually just fixed up a Compaq 433 with a Sony DVD-RW. To keep the nostalgia, I used the very first Sony Dual-Layer IDE drive they sold. :>). So the unit's got a 1GB IDE SSD and a 8.6GB capacity optical drive.

Personally, I don't think anything is completely obsolete, if you can find someone that needs it desperately.

I still make fax-server boxes for people who want to go old-school, using old USR Hardware modems (don't even touch WinModems). Faxes are still transmitted at 14.4kps at best (G3 speeds), so pretty much any computer will work.

Some of the old TV tuner (analog) cards used hardware encoding to convert, making pretty good for copying home videos. A few didn't recognized Macrovision, so I keep a half-dozen around to convert VHS movies you can't (And will never) find on DVD, let alone Bluray. Also convert Beta, and LaserDisc. (Yes, I have a Beta player, and like 5 LD players)

I just recently lost my best tech guy to retirement, he's quitting after 40 years in the business. I want to make a funny video of me taking a 486 to Best Buy and asking them to look at it.

Will I ever need that 12in / 2MB SCSI drive? Probably not. But, it's history.

Robin4 wrote:

I really dont think that any drive would be useless..

Either would I! that's why I said "undesirable"

Robin4 wrote:

There is nothing wrong with small capacity hard drives..

Agree again!, 6GB is my cut off, But if you have say a old PC that can handle up to 40MB would you bother getting anything less unless you already have it lying around?
I use smaller drives in my PC's as I already have them, but would never buy one again, so undesirable

Errius wrote:

OT: I've noticed that some of the newer USB drives, if you open them up, use hard drives with native USB interfaces. No SATA at all. It's USB all the way through.

It's not something new, actually. I have a couple Samsung (with real Samsung drives) S2 - one is a 160GB and the other 640GB - that have a USB interface soldered on the HDD's PCB instead of a SATA.

Is there any use, outside of nostalgia or "this is a weird system' for the first-generation Pentium 4s? RDRAM is rare, runs hot, and is slower than DDR which came shortly after. Never scaled well against a Pentium III, and has worse DOS compat and older software compat to boot. Pentium 4 in general has always been a dead area for me but these in specific seem utterly useless.

E: Also I always have a TV tuner in at least one of my oldsystems so I can play the PS2 through it. With a good monitor it works great.
Really wish I could find a Win98/2K or even XP compat one with component in.

SRQ wrote:

Is there any use, outside of nostalgia or "this is a weird system' for the first-generation Pentium 4s? RDRAM is rare, runs hot, and is slower than DDR which came shortly after. Never scaled well against a Pentium III, and has worse DOS compat and older software compat to boot. Pentium 4 in general has always been a dead area for me but these in specific seem utterly useless.

One answer, besides what you already stated vs a Pentium 3 system for daily usage. SSE2 instruction sets. Modern web browsers simply dont work or at best SUCK without it. An RDRAM P4 running XP or even 7 if your video card is DX9 compatible and 1gb of ram can still be a usable web browser/email user. Other than that not really, unless you want to use it as an alternative/cheaper P3 for W2K and or 98.

That use case seems to be best for just an outright socket 775 system or a Core 2.
I suppose though some people have limited options. P4 always fell into a weird spot for me where it's too new to reliably run the really old stuff, and too old to quickly run the new stuff.

More on topic: Pre 386 systems, or at least 286. I bought an XT clone recently and I'm looking at it like why the hell did I do that, what does it even /do/ augh.

Errius wrote:

OT: I've noticed that some of the newer USB drives, if you open them up, use hard drives with native USB interfaces. No SATA at all. It's USB all the way through.

It really pisses me off. I always recommend people buy standard SATA drives and their own enclosures rather than the retail crap.

SRQ wrote:

Is there any use, outside of nostalgia or "this is a weird system' for the first-generation Pentium 4s? RDRAM is rare, runs hot, and is slower than DDR which came shortly after. Never scaled well against a Pentium III, and has worse DOS compat and older software compat to boot. Pentium 4 in general has always been a dead area for me but these in specific seem utterly useless.

I recently built a socket 423 system. It was cheap to build (motherboard+CPU+RDRAM cost me less than a good Tualatin-capable socket 370 motherboard), it is as fast as a Tulatin system, heat is not a problem except for the RDRAM which does tend to be hot (I have a 120mm fan blowing directly over the memory which solves this problem), and has very good DOS compatibility thanks to a SB-link header that allows me to use YMF724/744 sound cards in it. Overall I'm quite happy with it.

oldpcguy wrote:

Will I ever need that 12in / 2MB SCSI drive? Probably not. But, it's history.

What's this?

Errius wrote:

oldpcguy wrote:

Will I ever need that 12in / 2MB SCSI drive? Probably not. But, it's history.

What's this?

Came from an old DEC Motorola-based server. It's a 12in SCSI hard drive with a 2MB capacity. Last used to program pagers and old radios.

I guess that old drives are only desirables if you can get spare disks/tapes. There is no point in getting a QIC40 if you have no tapes, can't get tapes or your old tapes are not legible (but keep in mind that some of that drives can be real good props... those open reel tape drives may look good even if they don't work).

That also applies to LS-120, superdisks and other drives. Although LS-120 was a great idea back in time, I wouldn't get it. I haven't any disk and getting disk will be expensive, so it would be sitting on a corner getting dust.

Anything involving Firewire.

ODwilly wrote:

Anything involving Firewire.

I don't know how many items we've had that are indisputably undesirable, but Firewire isn't one of them. Having an external FW hard disk is pretty much the only way to diagnose and troubleshoot certain problems on PowerPC Macs because you can't boot from USB on pre-Intel models. Just because PCs never used it for more than DV doesn't make it useless, but I can see why individuals wouldn't desire it 😀

Firewire target-disk allowed me to use a Powerbook G4 DVD drive to install 10.5 to a G4 desktop with a single layer disk. Hell of a thing.

brassicGamer wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Anything involving Firewire.

[...]Just because PCs never used it for more than DV doesn't make it useless, but I can see why individuals wouldn't desire it 😀

And audio. Actually some FireWire-based audio interface from RME are still highly sought after (search "RME FIreface" and you'll see it), if you have boards with FW chips that are known to work well with them (compatibility is an issue).

I liked FireWire because it carried enough power over the cable to dispense with external power supplies for things like external hard drives. (Though I've heard nasty stories of people frying their computers by hot-plugging FW cables, so maybe it wasn't such a good idea.)

oldpcguy wrote:

Errius wrote:

oldpcguy wrote:

Will I ever need that 12in / 2MB SCSI drive? Probably not. But, it's history.

What's this?

Came from an old DEC Motorola-based server. It's a 12in SCSI hard drive with a 2MB capacity. Last used to program pagers and old radios.

How was it deployed? In a rack?

Errius wrote:

I liked FireWire because it carried enough power over the cable to dispense with external power supplies for things like external hard drives. (Though I've heard nasty stories of people frying their computers by hot-plugging FW cables, so maybe it wasn't such a good idea.)

It was worse than that. The 10.3.1 system update for Panther caused FW800 drives to be corrupted merely by plugging them in.