People who want a hard drive of the same vintage as the rest of their hardware buy those.

Other uses are: scavenge for magnets, bearings, servos and other useful parts for unrelated projects, use them as ornaments like some people do, or even use them as creative music instruments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZTSGIzt8yc

personally, I would only use them for old system if I either don't have, can't afford or can't be arsed to acquire something else like CF cards or low capacity SSDs

GabrielKnight123 wrote:

... They are the standard 5 1/4 size drives.

You surely mean 3 1/2 size, unless you have a bunch of Bigfoots mixed in there...

Either way, HDDs of that size range and earlier are becoming difficult to find in working condition; I'd personally sell off/give away the ones that do work, to people who want a period-correct drive or at least the vintage "sound" in their machine.

~200MB HDDs could well be 5.25", possibly even full height. When 200MB was idiotically high-end, 5.25" was still a common size for HDDs, albeit half-height (i.e. same height as an optical drive today), but really big capacity drives added more platters and could be full height. I have a monster of a 680MB Maxtor ESDI drive here that's as big as a Seagate ST-412 and even heavier. No ESDI controller though...

But yes, only use is for vintage authenticity. Given drives are moving parts and tend to die, there are definitely people looking for them, and the older they are, the more sought-after they become. I sold a few 500MB-2GB drives for EUR 7.50 each recently, and a 300MB drive for EUR 15.

Certain specific models of hard drive can be worth a lot more than others of similar size and age if they are still working. Just ebay search the exact model numbers of the drives you have. There are some machines (not necessarily PC based) that can only use a specific drive. There are also industrial and often medical machines that are controlled by an embedded PC - if any part is changed the machine would need to be recertified - so it is cheaper to pay big $$$ for the exact same hard drive that was originally installed than it would to replace it with a CF card and recertify the machine.

I still have a few old IDE drives with limited capacity. Wherever possible, I use them in my retro systems as anything larger would be a waste for the most part.

I've got:
286 with 213MB HDD (nowhere near filling it either, currently using a DDO but will soon backup and switch to XTIDE)
386SX with 1.2GB (probably about 75% full, as above using a DDO but will soon backup and switch to XTIDE)
486 DX33 with 2.5GB (dual boot setup with Win 95 & NT 4, using it with the help of XTIDE)
Socket 5, IDT Winchip C6 with 640MB HDD (this will be upgraded at some point though, as 640MB is nowhere near enough for a PC like this)
K6-2 system with 4.3GB

Then a whole bunch of systems which have 6GB drives. I'm guessing those 6GB drives must have been really common and affordable at some point.

I have also in storage a spare 1.3GB drive, that at some point I'll probably put into the 486 and move the 2.5GB into the Socket 5 PC.

Also in storage and probably the most useless IDE drive in my whole collection: a Fujitsu M2616ET 104MB drive! If I ever build another 286-386 era PC or get a working IDE controller for my 8088/XT, this would be perfect but until then it's just gathering dust.

I'm gutted that last year the original hard drive in my 386SX died - a Connor 40MB. It was fun trying to cram as much as I could on that thing, but one day it couldn't take anymore and stopped spinning up. 🤣

I have a 254MB 3.5" HDD scavenged from an HP Vectra, and a drive that small is pretty well useless outside of a 286. I've got a dying 1GB HDD in my 486, and I'd like to bump it up to at least 2GB, but drives between 2 and 8GB tend to cost a lot more than I'm willing to spend for something I won't put to even weekly use. Of course, if I needed an 80GB hard drive, they cost less than lunch at a diner.

SW-SSG youre right I should have said 3 1/2 inch im going to go through all the drives I have with HDAT2 to test them for bad clusters and sell the lot on ebay for a fair price and not like what I have seen, some people think a single drive is worth 3 digits.

Mister Xiado wrote:

I have a 254MB 3.5" HDD scavenged from an HP Vectra, and a drive that small is pretty well useless outside of a 286. I've got a dying 1GB HDD in my 486, and I'd like to bump it up to at least 2GB, but drives between 2 and 8GB tend to cost a lot more than I'm willing to spend for something I won't put to even weekly use. Of course, if I needed an 80GB hard drive, they cost less than lunch at a diner.

Back in the day 254mb hard drive would have been late 486 or a pentium hard drive, so it feels weird for someone to say that it is useless in anything else except 286. At least here most 286 had something like 40 or 60mb drives.

Baoran wrote:

Back in the day 254mb hard drive would have been late 486 or a pentium hard drive, so it feels weird for someone to say that it is useless in anything else except 286. At least here most 286 had something like 40 or 60mb drives.

I agree but not fully.

286s were almost always came with drives (if they had any) around 40MB in size, also in here. But... When I bought my first ever PC in early 1992 (a cheapo 386SX-16, I had a very limited budget), 386DX was the king, 286 was something nobody buys, 486 was the (very) high end. 386DX-40s were going with 80 or 120MB HDDs. And 200 and more MBs were definately high end. Mine came with a 40MB drive, not because it's mainstream, but because I was poor. In late 1993 though, I supplied it with a second drive, an 240MB one.

When I finally upgraded my whole system into a 486-33 in mid 1994, I used the same drives, but by the end of 1994 and during first half of 1995, 540MB limit was already reached, VL bus controllers with their own "8GB" limit BIOSes was mainstream. This was the time of (not so) late 486 and early Pentium.

When I get my first Pentium in late 1996 / early 97 , It already had bigger-than-a-GB drives which I transfered from my last 486 system (Cyrix 5x86).

So, 250MB HDD being a thing for late 486 / early Pentium is a bit off.

All aside, my 486 build today has a 20GB and a 30 GB drive on it. My 386SX build has a 3GB. I don't see any point in limiting myself in HDD capacity today, which was a thing of the past, due to lack of money and BIOS limitations.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that all the HDDs I talked about above in my 386/486 builds are real mechanical HDDs. I use real HDDs in all of my retro builds. Actually 6 of the 7 HDDs in my daily modern(?) PC are also real HDDs. I love mechanical HDDs, both SCSI and IDE, just not the oldest and relatively expensive small capacity ones. 😊

Old IDE drives are also useful for older consoles such as Xbox Original ..and PS2...
I personally use a lot for bulding period correct PCs with OS from win95 through win2000.
They are also useful in some audio equipment such as the Philips WAC700.
In short ..I like 'em and try to collect as many as I can to repurpose..
A good source for these being TV freeview or freesat boxes...though often these have been hammered due to the nature of the source.
Modern sata drives have their uses ,,,and coupled with adapter/convertors moreso for older tech ...
that said I honestly feel that sata drives are less durable and built to fail quicker.
I still have a couple of oil bearing coners that appear to work just fine after all those years ...
and a 750gb IDE that I only use for storage since most bios's dont even see it.
rgds
VS

Of course there is no reason to limit yourself unless you want to build period correct pc.
I have a 120Mb conner hard drive and I was just trying to figure out few days ago if it would be period correct or too big for a 1990 386 that I am planning on building. Earliest ads I found for the drive in a computer magazines was in 1991, so it might work out barely.

Being period-correct is about the only reason to use an old drive. If you're not being period-correct they are big, noisy, unreliable and hard to come by and/or expensive. CF cards or SATA SSDs via adapters are a far, far better idea for practical storage. Or you can go hybrid - I now at last have a case that is contemporary with my ST-412, so I intend to install it in there with a suitably old motherboard+CPU. I also intend to try to get an IDE controller working at the same time and boot from CF, with the ST-412 mainly for looks & sound effects.

What about those compatibility problems some people have been having with CF cards? I have seen in youtube videos many people getting all kinds of errors when trying to use a CF card in an old pc.

Not experienced any myself, which leads me to believe it's not something inherent in CF, but just with specific cards my cheapest-512MB-on-AliExpress ones seem fine . I've had more issues with PATA to SATA adapters though.

Baoran wrote:

What about those compatibility problems some people have been having with CF cards? I have seen in youtube videos many people getting all kinds of errors when trying to use a CF card in an old pc.

Overrated I belive. I use cheapest adapters from ebay and aliexpress and faced very very few road blocks. My cards are known brands (like Sandisk and Kingston) and I believe in XT-IDE though.

That aside, I never use them as primary storage devices, I prefer mechanical HDDs and use the CF cards only for easy data transfer

The usage for old harddrives, is when hardware will not accept anything else (yes, I have seen controllers that refused to work with CF/SD) or if you absolutely love loud noises so much that you can not live with CF/SD cards. To me, the only time I use real drives, is when I can not get anything else to work with the controller. I have plenty of silent platter drives for Win98, so I was actually speaking about hardware from before 1995.

Baoran wrote:

What about those compatibility problems some people have been having with CF cards? I have seen in youtube videos many people getting all kinds of errors when trying to use a CF card in an old pc.

I have never seen it on any PC. Yet I have seen it on Amiga's. This however comes down to the adaptor and controller and not the card it self. As an example, then the absolute cheapest adaptor will not work on a stock Amiga4000. And the controller in the Amiga600 and 1200 will have activity led issues or not work, if the CF Adaptor is not wired up as a real IDE device. This goes for SD card adaptors as well. As an example, I had to buy a special adaptor for my 600, if I wanted to use my SD card adaptor. If I did not have that adaptor, then the HDD-Led would be constantly activated/on. Another issue, again Amiga related, is that some CF cards will refuse to work with these CF-PCMCIA adaptors. Why that is are mostly unknown. This just illustrates that there are indeed differences between cards as well. And most of the issues are not on the PC platform.

There is no need for the most expensive adaptors, yet avoid the cheapest solutions as well. Go for decent adaptors instead.

The noises are pretty significant. From using a PC, you can't usually tell whether a system's components are period correct, but you'll definitely hear it if the HDD is gone or much newer. I just don't like dead vintage machines.

paperweight/USB OS installer