This is with a mechanical HDD on my 286-20. 16bit SCSI

I’ve been pretty happy with my scsi on my pod build also.

A xt-ide would be a good way to add flash storage to a old system. Does your system have 8 bit or 16 bit isa?

A 8 bit xt-ide would be slower but i believe you can use that 8 bit xt-ide to boot a 16 bit ide card which would solve that.

Your fastest are prob 16 bit ide and scsi.

I use a 15k rpm on my scsi 😁

From my experience I dont feel like storage has been bottleneck at least in 12Mhz 286 pc. Running software or games that a 286 feels about the same no matter if using 16bit or 8bit speeds. Also games that you can run on a 286 dont take much space so I never felt need for more storage than the bios can handle.

Oh btw, there are 44 pin ssd drives also. You could use one of them with an adapter cable. They are internally ide to sata

Msata SSDs + 44pin IDE enclosure seems to be popular, too.
Used this combination for a Mac Mini G4..

286.. The low access time of a CF card might make a difference, even if the throughput in MB/s of a HDD is the same.
Also, the IDE "controller" in the 286 merely is a dumb host adapter most of the time.
It's just some minimalistic IDE to ISA interface, with an off-the-shelf IC as an address decoder.
That means that the ISA bus speed has an effect on the transfer speed of the CF.

The "best" way to go about it would be to use your existing ide controller and connect the CF directly to it.
Then via the bootrom function of a network card load xt-ide bios extension essentially replacing the original bios HDD portion in order to gain large HDD support. Then you get to use your original 16bit controller and not care about CF size.

Alternatively, the easiest way would be to use a xt-ide controller, in a 286 it will be just fine.

+1

XT-IDE BIOS can also be configured to use an Secondary Master device,
so a soundcard with an IDE/ATAPI port can be used, too.
Same goes for a dumb CD-ROM controller card (IDE).

The only condition is, that the soundcard is EEPROM or jumper configured.
The IDE/ATAPI port must be available right from the start when the computer powers on.
A Sound Blaster with Plug&Play is not suited, but, say, an old CT17xx is..

SB Pro 2 clones such as ESS688 may also work, if an ATAPI interface is available on the card.

Edit: Photo added: Turned a CD controller into an ISA SSD card..

Edit: Moar pictures.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-09-22, 08:08:

The only condition is, that the soundcard is EEPROM or jumper configured.
The IDE/ATAPI port must be available right from the start when the computer powers on.
A Sound Blaster with Plug&Play is not suited, but, say, an old CT17xx is..

I remember someone on vogons linking to his xtide bios patch with added SB PnP initialization routine

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Seems like there are a number of good options for getting CF cards to work in a 286 machine. One consideration I do have is I'm hoping to install a number of sound cards in this machine. So figuring out how I'm going to juggle ISA slots is going to be one consideration in which CF option I go with.

At the moment, I may go with re-flashing the main BIOS since I can use the existing controller card without having to sacrifice additional ISA slots. We'll see how that works out, but at least I know there are a few more options if it doesn't work.

You're welcome. ^^

There's another solution, albeit it's a bit outdated: DOCs - Disc-On-Chip modules (DiscOnChip 2000 series).

Essentially, they are like EEPROMs to the host hardware.
They contain a boot loader and a virtual filesystem.

Not fast, but easy to interface with any system.

Some embedded systems of the 1990s had sockets for them.

Maybe ethernet cards can be used as host, too, not sure.
The write pin for EPROM programming might have to be available/controllable all the time, I guess?

There are combined DOC and RTC cards for PC/XTs, too.

https://www.smbaker.com/8-bit-isa-diskonchip-rtc-board

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRE5t24MS4

Question regarding using XTIDE on NIC cards.

I have a NIC that I believe supports up to a 32kB EPROM, with options for 16kB and 8kB as well.

Would a larger EPROM be an issue? I currently only have 128kB EPROMs on hand. If I was to program one of those and pad out the remaining storage in the chip, would it still work?

Or do I need an EPROM appropriate to what the NIC itself will support?

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-09-27, 22:09:

Question regarding using XTIDE on NIC cards.

Oki-doki. ^^

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-09-27, 22:09:

Would a larger EPROM be an issue? I currently only have 128kB EPROMs on hand.

128KB is really large. The pinout certainly doesn't match that of an 2764 (8KB), 27128 (16KB) or 27256 (32KB). The maximum in the old days was 27512 (64KB), afaik, and had minor pinout issues already (simple adapter required).

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Network-boot-HOWTO/a628.html

Maybe you can get an ATMEL AT28C64B?
https://retrocmp.de/hardware/xt-cf-lite/xt-cf-lite.htm

Alternatively, there are cheap 27xxx EPROMs in the form of OTPs. One-Time-Programmable EPROMs.
They can't be erased, sadly, because the quarz window is missing (too costly).

Anyway, here are some old images that worked for me:

Re: IDE disk-on-module + 386

They're still fine for testing/troubleshooting, though. The checksum is already written into it, auto-detection is enabled..
Can't remember, if boot support for Secondary IDE is enabled, though, sorry. 🤷‍♂️

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-09-27, 22:09:

If I was to program one of those and pad out the remaining storage in the chip, would it still work?

No, I'm afraid this doesn't work.

The address decoding in a PC doesn't work that way, sadly. 🙁

What you can do, however:

a) Fill the EPROM with duplicates of the image. The COPY command can help.
COPY /B (binary copy), more precisely.
You can do something like COPY /B IMAGE.BIN+IMAGE.BIN > 2X-IMAGE.BIN

b) Finish a), then disable some memory banks of the EPROM by tying some address pins high/low (to +5v or ground).
Use either resistors as pull-ups/pull-downs or do make some shorts (careful, not all chips like that).

The advantage of b) is, that the address space (UMA, 640KB-1MB) isn't filled with multiple copies of XTIDE Universal BIOS.

The b) method was used in the C64 days, to install several kernals in a single EPROM.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-09-27, 22:09:

Or do I need an EPROM appropriate to what the NIC itself will support?

It would certainly cause less headaches, I assume.

Good luck! 🙂🤞

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-09-27, 22:09:

Question regarding using XTIDE on NIC cards.
[...]

once you get some chip write what you got and I will post a suitable .BIN for it
personally I am a fan of W27C512 eeproms that are plentiful and cheap
then it will be just a matter of activating the NIC bootrom function and setting HDD in BIOS to either NONE or some random model - it depends on the BIOS worst case system will not boot from CF and you will need to try the other option