Those are your options right there AFAIK. I'm curious why you don't want to use the real thing?

A few of reasons really. I had a hard disk die on me recently and had to go looking for a replacement - all the possible replacements I found are equally old and could fail just as quickly. I sometimes sell on old systems through a popular online auction site, and it would be nice not to have to worry about hard disks surviving shipping - the same applies to buying drives in the first place.

I also have an old Pentium machine with a Quantum Fireball drive that makes the bad old bearing noise and hurts my head too much to use for very long - would be nice to lose that too 😜
The old crunchy grinding noises can be fun but I would be happier if these things were available new and reliable.

If you have a PCI slot, you can always use a PCI SATA Controller and use whatever SATA drive you want to.

The Promise S150 based controllers work fine.

WildW wrote:

[*]Disk-on-module - which seem to be very small capacity IDE solid state drives for industrial PC use.

Just a comment about the capacity: yes DOMs have been a thing for quite some time and maybe you encounter some ridiculously sized ones. But larger ones, like 8/16/32GBs, do exist. When it comes to non-mechanical storage media I tend to prefer CFs for DOS/Win3.x PCs because of their cost/availability and DOMs for Windows 95 and later since they are really built as hard disk replacements.

WildW wrote:

A few of reasons really. I had a hard disk die on me recently and had to go looking for a replacement - all the possible replacements I found are equally old and could fail just as quickly. I sometimes sell on old systems through a popular online auction site, and it would be nice not to have to worry about hard disks surviving shipping - the same applies to buying drives in the first place.

I also have an old Pentium machine with a Quantum Fireball drive that makes the bad old bearing noise and hurts my head too much to use for very long - would be nice to lose that too 😜
The old crunchy grinding noises can be fun but I would be happier if these things were available new and reliable.

I never mind the crunching sounds, but the whining makes my ears bleed 😵
I'm a big fan of laptop drives, even some 20GB ones I used were near completely silent once mounted inside the case 😀
Imo harddrives became much less whiny after they gotten fluid bearings, but the crunching sounds were still there (win/win! 😁)

Disk on module sounds quite interesting though, I never really delved into that subject.

I have atleast 10 Disk on Modules in use and they all work perfect as replacement for old IDE harddisks.
I have them in sizes from 128Mb up till 32Gb and they work like a charm, never had a single problem with them. I do prefer the brand Kingspec since none had any issues.
I have 5 spares currently for upcoming builds or in case some of the old drives still in use finally go to harddiskheaven. 🤣

If you have money to piss away, try to find some good SCSI drives. Those things were built to last nuclear winters, and most of them still work to this day. I have 4 drives, 3 10Ks and 1 15K, all Ultra320 with SCA-80 connectors, and they work as well as they did when they were new in the early 2000's. This is the best option, but it's also the most expensive.

Ampera wrote:

This is the best option, but it's also the most expensive.

And with a few exceptions the noisiest.

Ampera wrote:

If you have money to piss away, try to find some good SCSI drives. Those things were built to last nuclear winters, and most of them still work to this day. I have 4 drives, 3 10Ks and 1 15K, all Ultra320 with SCA-80 connectors, and they work as well as they did when they were new in the early 2000's. This is the best option, but it's also the most expensive.

I replaced enough of those drives in my life to be sure they don't last that exceptionally long. Biggest issue is they don't like to stop and start again, like happens in a consumer like pc/older system for fun. Ofcourse there are lucky drives that last way longer then normal but none of those drives on average lasted longer then 4 years.
Longest living stuff is the high end ssd's which currently are insanely expensive but we had one DOA sofar and not a single dead drive after three years which is promising. (If tomorrow drives start to die then I have to rectify this 🤣 🤣 )

And those drives generate alot of heat/noise. I prefer the silent non moving stuff that exist today like DOM's and SSD.

I had a few issues whilst trying solid state drives on Win98. The issue mostly amounted to stuttering and drops in performance. So nothing to serious but still there.

Nvm1 wrote:

I replaced enough of those drives in my life to be sure they don't last that exceptionally long. Biggest issue is they don't lik […]
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Ampera wrote:

If you have money to piss away, try to find some good SCSI drives. Those things were built to last nuclear winters, and most of them still work to this day. I have 4 drives, 3 10Ks and 1 15K, all Ultra320 with SCA-80 connectors, and they work as well as they did when they were new in the early 2000's. This is the best option, but it's also the most expensive.

I replaced enough of those drives in my life to be sure they don't last that exceptionally long. Biggest issue is they don't like to stop and start again, like happens in a consumer like pc/older system for fun. Ofcourse there are lucky drives that last way longer then normal but none of those drives on average lasted longer then 4 years.
Longest living stuff is the high end ssd's which currently are insanely expensive but we had one DOA sofar and not a single dead drive after three years which is promising. (If tomorrow drives start to die then I have to rectify this 🤣 🤣 )

And those drives generate alot of heat/noise. I prefer the silent non moving stuff that exist today like DOM's and SSD.

I would wager that those drives are statistically less likely to fail compared to consumer grade IDE drives. If you've worked in a place with thousands upon thousands of those drives, then of course it will seem like they drop like flies, however I would bet that if you had replaced those with consumer grade IDE drives, you'd have 20 times the failure rate.

It is true SSDs are fast, reliable, and expensive, but they will die too. Flash memory has a limited number of writes in it's life, and once that's up it will break down.

I have many old SCSI drives. More than I know what to do with. (Most of my machines are retired servers so they usually came with multiple SCSI drives). I try to put them in my builds just to get some use out of them.

Ampera wrote:

If you have money to piss away, try to find some good SCSI drives. Those things were built to last nuclear winters, and most of them still work to this day. I have 4 drives, 3 10Ks and 1 15K, all Ultra320 with SCA-80 connectors, and they work as well as they did when they were new in the early 2000's. This is the best option, but it's also the most expensive.

Isn't this suggestion a bit like telling someone who doesn't like the experience of driving to ride with Lewis Hamilton?