80-340MB
640MB / 640MB-2GB
4-8GB
8-20GB
20-40GB
40-60GB

My PowerBook G3 (Lombard, 1999) came with a 4GB hard drive. The Dell Inspiron 8500 with a Pentium 4 had either a 30 or 60GB hard drive. IBM ThinkPad 700 had an 80 to 120MB hard drive, and the 750s had either 170 to 340MB, both of which came with 486es.

RetroLaptopy wrote on 2022-11-12, 19:04:

- with a Pentium / Pentium MMX processor

The Thinkpad 365 series I'm looking at (maybe I'll open a topic about it now) is in the 1 GB range (with a "nice" CHS-only ~8 GB maximum, of course...)

RetroLaptopy wrote on 2022-11-12, 19:04:

- with a Pentium 4 / Athlon XP processor
- with a PentiumM processor

Can't say I know what it actually has inside but my first Packard Bell iGo = NEC Versa E400, with some kind of Celeron in the peak P4 years, is still on the original Fujitsu 20 GB 😀

I was recently looking to do the same until I realised it is now cheaper to buy a complete 486dx-2 including a crt monitor, keyboard and mouse just to get the HDD rather than tryeto get a HDD between 100mb~500mb these days (at least in EU where I'm located). I suspect all those hdds broke down by now or they were snapped by data recovery places.

To me getting a CF to Ide + a small industrial CF card starts to sound more and more appealing.

I can second the CF to IDE adapter. My Lombard is CF-modded and it's great -- not only is the performance similar enough to not have it feel significantly faster, which isn't really a plus to me but I know is for some, but it more importantly allows me to switch between a Mac OS 9.0/10.0 DP2 card and a Void Linux card easily, and it just works seamlessly. Plus, 100-500MB CF cards are significantly easier to find and cheaper when you do.

Let’s see

My 286, 1.44mb floppy only
First b&w 486 laptop - 120mb circa 1998
Second color 486dx40 - 1.2gb
First 486dx2 all in one circa 1995 540mb

Most iconic 486 systems had a 540mb

Mine:
386dx 25 80mb IDE
AMD 486DX 40 overclocked to 50MHz 270MB and 210MB in two drive configuration.
Pentium 100, 1080MB
PII 350 9GB
Athlon around 15 or so, forgot that era.
Home built P5K with C2D 2.93GHz dual core pentium started with 200GB.
Optiplex 780 320GB, was about 3 or 4 years old when built to get DDR3 starting at 2GB then 4GB, eventually went to 16GB and this was the 3 generations of OS too. XP, then 7 then win 10.
Z220 current 2TB, then dual 4TB plus 500GB SSD.

Cheers,

Mechanical, will die even when not used (rubber bump stop melting etc). Imo fools errand unless meant as a collectors piece not turned on ever again. Something like comparing cars on display at Narodowe Muzeum Techniki https://nmt.waw.pl to the ones at Muzeum Motoryzacji i Techniki w Otrębusach http://www.muzeum-motoryzacji.com.pl/ or Muzeum Skarb Narodu https://muzeumskarbnarodu.pl/o-wystawie/

I prefer to use conventional mechanical hard drives however I have been noticing that many of my hard drives from 1990’s are beginning to fail. Not exactly sure why this is happening because these are NOS or low use drives.

So I may just have to convert to CF cards which I really don’t want to do.

Just run HDAT2 and wipe the drive, then try to format it. Sometimes logical bad blocks can appear if you leave the drive unused for a long time, but exercising those sectors again will fix them.

If that doesn't solve the problem, it means the bad sectors are due to a physical issue with the media, which means the drive is on its way out. Most of my drives from the mid-90's onwards still work perfectly, and I perform regular checks on those that I have in storage. I've had very few HDD deaths from reasons other than stupidity (i.e. dropping the drive on the floor). The ones that die on their own are usually known problematic models which are best avoided (Quantum rubber-stop melting, IBM "Deathstar" and so on).

* I mostly use mechanical hard drives, also ran into strange "LBA" incompatibilities at the early years of it. Therefore I have multiple DOS drives to boot various 486/socket4/mrbios 386 things. But the "master" is always the one that's compatible with the more modern interpretation of LBA, the one that a Socket7 or later board handles. And the more civilized 486s agree with it too... It's usually a 4GiB Seagate piece with a metal underplate which is very convenient, I can place it anywhere like on top of a PSU without shorting anything. Actually I stockpiled quite a few of these metal plated 3-6GiB drives, they have space for a nice demo collection and many DOS games.
For my permanent P3 and the likes I collected 20-30 and 40-120GiB drives with similar metal plates (both Seagate and WD had such models), these are quite spacious for win98 usage, and also suitable for XP based systems.
I actually have even 500G PATA drives just to be on the safe side and my SATA pile goes up from there, effectively consisting mostly of 1TiB pieces as bigger working ones are rarely thrown away.
And from w7 on I like to use SSDs for test systems (and my Core2 laptop drive falls into this category), but as the scraps rarely contain anything bigger than 120GiB my permanent "modern" builds still need mechanical drives too.
Before the LBA age there's the 512MiB limit where 256/512M CF cards are quite abundant and useful. But - I still have small HDDs in those sizes, like 200-850 MiB (the latter isn't used to its full extent but it isn't a problem). My 286 and 386 builds contain those Quantum 850 drives as I found them relatively silent (though still noisy in more modern terms).
I have MFM drives too, I find something special in their chirping though their buzzsaw background noise is quite annoying... But I have no XTIDE so I use them - or SCSI as I found a pair of 8-bit SCSI adapters. They are very nice and SCSI can be used on more modern systems too, to copy over the XT class content. I don't find MFM particularly reliable, SCSI can save the day...

Back in the day, I always felt like I never had enough hard drive space (regardless of the platform). Now, with pennies per GB, I never have that problem with older equipment.

I recommend that you get the largest capacity drive that your hardware platform can electrically handle. If you feel you must limit your storage space to "typical" capacities, just partition the drive to a capacity less than maximum. You can always re-partition or add partitions if you feel like you need a little extra room (you probably will).

I did this recently with a 486 that I slowed down to 386 speeds to relive my first computer experience. I partitioned and formatted a 40 GB drive to 60 MB (the capacity of my first computer's drive) and then I ran MS DoubleSpace. Aw, the good old days...

Of course, if you're a collector, then get whatever drive suits your fancy.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2022-11-13, 13:50:

Back in the day, I always felt like I never had enough hard drive space (regardless of the platform). Now, with pennies per GB, […]
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Back in the day, I always felt like I never had enough hard drive space (regardless of the platform). Now, with pennies per GB, I never have that problem with older equipment.

I recommend that you get the largest capacity drive that your hardware platform can electrically handle. If you feel you must limit your storage space to "typical" capacities, just partition the drive to a capacity less than maximum. You can always re-partition or add partitions if you feel like you need a little extra room (you probably will).

I did this recently with a 486 that I slowed down to 386 speeds to relive my first computer experience. I partitioned and formatted a 40 GB drive to 60 MB (the capacity of my first computer's drive) and then I ran MS DoubleSpace. Aw, the good old days...

Of course, if you're a collector, then get whatever drive suits your fancy.

I have several dozen laptops in my collection and I want each of them to have a disk with a capacity as close as possible to the original one with which it was released. For tests, I use mSATA disks in an IDE44pin adapter or a disk from a Compact Flash card. I use two or three machines on a daily basis and there I have the largest capacity of the available disks.