Welcome to Vogons.

Practically almost anything is possible, but can cost more money than one is wiling or able to spend.

If the objective is to fill the case with as many functionally usable components as possible, adding a SCSI card and 5 or 6 SCSI optical drives and/or hard disks is possible as is adding multiple IDE cards (on different addresses) and running some drives off of those.

It can be made to work in one way or another, if that is your objective, but usable does not necessarily equate with useful or "worth" spending money on (all very subjective things in this hobby)

Of course, the main objective is presumably for you to have fun, so you do you and enjoy. I suggest, however, that you start with first setting an objective of getting a working machine going without any joyful excesses, inventory the specific hardware you have in it (and share that info) and then start looking at overkill stuff to fill things to the brim. Just my 2 cents worth of an opinion.

Heehee. I know, I have been working with retro Apples for years. I'm branching out so I can play Ultima VI on OG hardware. I have spent so much on toys for the Apples it's unreal.

The machine works fine (okay I messed up the mouse trying to clean it but that's not hard to replace and it was partially hosed anyway) and now I'm just working on "see what I can do with it." CF card is mostly to move games from the modern machines over to it and the CDROM I suspect will also be mission critical. At that point I think I'm out of power sockets as well so that might be the stopping point.

The max IDE config without going to extremes that might be got with mainstream hardware from the mid 90s, would be primary and secondary IDE controllers with 2 drives on each (Maybe on one superIO, VLB or PCI or onboard) and tertiary controller on a soundcard that can be set to IRQ11 or something, many will only set to IRQ15 which is the secondary. That can also have 2 drives, non-bootable. Possibly a second soundcard IDE for quaternary is also possible on IRQ 10 or 12... but you are probably out of luck now for having IRQs left for a network controller, and may only be able to have one sound architecture enabled at a time, because of no extra IRQs.

That gives you 4 bootable HDDs, which can have 4 primary partitions, so 16 OS flavors bootable from boot disk selection and lilo or loadlin etc.

If you wanna go completely all out, you can probably dig out the unicorn adapters to have 4 IDE, 2 scsi interfaces with internal and external chains and an 8 bit MFM/RLL controller with 2 drives also. Then you can get a couple of parallel port CDROM/removable (zip, qic, LS120 etc) if you've still got IRQs for parallel ports.

I'll prolly go secondary IDE to get the CDROM going unless my SB16 clone can handle it. I'll have to try and pull a manual on it and see. Did they make IDE controller cards that just did HDD, I don't need a copy of the one I have now that has one set of pins for HDD and one for the floppy drives. (Googles...)

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-12, 22:37:

The max IDE config without going to extremes that might be got with mainstream hardware from the mid 90s, would be primary and secondary IDE controllers with 2 drives on each (Maybe on one superIO, VLB or PCI or onboard) and tertiary controller on a soundcard that can be set to IRQ11 or something, many will only set to IRQ15 which is the secondary. That can also have 2 drives, non-bootable. Possibly a second soundcard IDE for quaternary is also possible on IRQ 10 or 12... but you are probably out of luck now for having IRQs left for a network controller, and may only be able to have one sound architecture enabled at a time, because of no extra IRQs.

That gives you 4 bootable HDDs, which can have 4 primary partitions, so 16 OS flavors bootable from boot disk selection and lilo or loadlin etc.

If you wanna go completely all out, you can probably dig out the unicorn adapters to have 4 IDE, 2 scsi interfaces with internal and external chains and an 8 bit MFM/RLL controller with 2 drives also. Then you can get a couple of parallel port CDROM/removable (zip, qic, LS120 etc) if you've still got IRQs for parallel ports.

Now, I want to see this 😀
I don't think this much is needed for his machine 🙁 - hope someone will do it someday

Scsi card and a sound blaster with a ide port plus whatever the mobo has should have you covered. Might even be able to get it working with IRQs not conflicting.

As far as tidiness. Can’t beat scsi. It can be all on one cable 🤣 what, like up to 7 drives?

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-12, 23:09:

Scsi card and a sound blaster with a ide port plus whatever the mobo has should have you covered. Might even be able to get it working with IRQs not conflicting.

As far as tidiness. Can’t beat scsi. It can be all on one cable 🤣 what, like up to 7 drives?

Mobo has nothing onboard. I have played with SCSI on old Macs and am convinced it is magic or something. Right now it has an IDE card that talks to the HDD and the floppy drives. It's OLD.

Just to confirm your currant I/O card already has a primary and secondary IDE header allowing you a max of 4 drives if you configure a Master and Slave drive on each IDE channel?

Which motherboard do you have?
If it has VLB you would really want a VLB I/O card and if it has PCI you could even run sata raid card.
One thing to consider is max supported hard drive size, alot of 486's max out at 500MB later ones 8GB although you can use drive overlay software to get around this but it may well be you run out of drive letters, especially if its a pure dos rig limited to 2gb partitions.

It's still a fun experiment though!

SCSI and some internal Nakamichi CD changers. You won't have enough drive letters for sure.

Disruptor wrote on 2022-10-14, 15:58:

SCSI and some internal Nakamichi CD changers. You won't have enough drive letters for sure.

I'm somewhat positive Pioneer had DOS software to manage CD changers by LUN without persistent drive letters for each disc, so 198 Disc is doable I have a few changers and some Nak's too. I *think* my EISA 486 had 4 wide channels and it's upgrade was a IT5H with SIX wide channels for which Buslogic (Mylex) themselves modded the bios of one controller (5,6) while 1-4 coexisted fine.

I'll quote myself from here Re: Can't find a way to connect a CR-562-B CD-ROM to via IDE connection , to share another "option", that I would not recommend (drives are more expensive and rather unreliable, though mostly repairable with 3D printed parts, AFAICR).

Also, a beefy power supply (by AT PSU standards) is recommended to handle that many drives at once.

darry wrote on 2021-06-05, 22:03:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-06-05, 20:45:

Older CDROM drives usually only like disks written in DAO mode, disk at once, not multisession. Then also they like particular dye colors and not others. Best compatibility is meant to be with gold colored CD-RWs written DAO.

And with something both not likely designed with CD-R in mind and this old, adjustment of laser gain might be necessary if CD-R is to be readable at all (probably not good for laser longevity).

I once briefly setup and tested a makeshift CD tower running Linux (probably Slackware) and using 2x 40-pin cables (EDIT : with 4 drive connectors each), 2 MKE controllers and something like 6 or maybe even 8 CR-562-B and CR-563-B (I actually had more to be used as spares) drives (people were basically giving those drives away by then) . AFAICR, the ability to read a given CD-R disk varied greatly between drives with at least one working just fine and at least one not at all with most recognizing the CD-R but being marginal at reading it . I personally never went so far as to play with gain, simply gave up on the project and junked the drives .

I'll say though that multiple drives in a 486 wasn't really unusual way back. Ppl who didn't compute before ~2001 don't understand completely that there was never enough hard drive space. Hard drive space was comparitively expensive, just enough HDD to install an OS, and one big app, smallest new HDD you can get today is in the region of $30-$50, in 1993 it was $200, which is probably $400 or $500 in today's money. Therefore you used every hard drive you could get your hands on, look, a used 40MB clapped out Connor for $5? Awesome... Yeah, I'll doublespace it and scandisk it 6 times until it stops finding bad sectors.... the storage dam cracked a little as we went into gigabyte sizes, but software was bloating just as fast. CDROM seemed like an answer "Aww yiss, 650MB of data I don't have to install on my HDD." until a couple of years later it got to "Wat? why da hell do I gotta install 500MB to use this CD???". Even when you bought a new "big" drive, it wasn't many geeks who would let go of the old one, maybe it built a second system, but frequently it would be drive D or E to the new C. You'd get a "drive train" that followed you through upgrades, the new one and the last two biggest.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-14, 17:24:

there was never enough hard drive space.

So true, oh the nightmares setups at the time.
In my case is was a DX2/66 with just the one IDE channel. Somewhat lucky was the CD-Rom was the Panasonic interface style hanging off the sound card.
Got a "massive" 1GB HDD in 96? The original 420MB drive was double spaced and held zipped up games, apps, and anything else for "long term storage" as accessing that drive was s.l.o.w.
but when you only have floppy disks for external storage what else could you do?

late 90's early you did start to see "severs" PC's built from left over parts of upgrades with as any old hard drives slapped in, they weren't pretty, usually a under resourced Win9x PC with crap graphics no sound but as long as they held the files then nothing else mattered