Baoran wrote on 2018-12-11, 01:15:
dionb wrote:I'd say you're being optimistic there. Just looking at my own experience - in 1988 we had a pretty high-end 386-16 with a 60MB HDD. Friends with 286s and 20-40MB drives were jealous! In 1995 my Pentium 60 came with a 540MB HDD. Nothing special this time, but not small either. 4GB drives didn't become common until late 1997 or so, i.e. until the transition to P2. No P2 consumer-grade P2 would have been shipped with a 20GB drive either, that's deep P3 territory.
Good source for HDDs from the early 1980s to the early 2000s:
http://redhill.net.au/d/i.php
I got 40Mb hard drive with my 286 and upgraded it to 120Mb when I upgraded my 286 to 386. I bought a 4.2Gb quantum bigfoot CY with my P1. I skipped 486 completely back then so I am not expert on that.
Same here. I had an 80 MB AT-Bus HDD by Conner in my 286.
But it was configured as a 40 MB model, because CMOS Setup Utility didn't have Type 47 support (custom values)..
That being said, this was in the early 90s.
My 286 was being equipped with 386/486 era parts.
Because that's what was available at the time.
Some may not find this period-correct, despite the fact that the setup existed in said time period (a paradox). 🤷♂️
Anyway, if you guys are into old, 286 era OSes, like PC-DOS 3.30 from 1987 (introduced AT support)..
Please just do take orientation by the supported capacity of the OSes.
DOS 3.30 supported 32 MB per partition, for example.
So if you don't want to use multiple partitions (DOS/DATA/GAMES/..), a small HDD suffices.
Less known OSes like Compaq DOS 3.31 or PC-MOS/386 did support greater partitions. About 256 or 512 MB or something along these lines.
Then there were filecards aka hardcards for ISA slot.
They were in the 20 to 80 MB range, I believe.
Edit: In the professional fields, free HDD space was always getting low.
That's were traditional thinking ends.
In some fields, even a 386 of the late 80s was being equipped with ~250MB SCSI drives or a couple of small drives.
It simply was needed to manage lots of data.
Think of a Novell Netware Server or a CAD/CAM or DTP workstation.
Edit: Capacity fixed.
Edit: I need to double check..
But it seems that the Seagate ST41600N was an 1,3GB SCSI HDD from 1991.
Source:
https://computer-retro.de/Festplatten.html
Pictures
So 500 MB to ~800 MB models may have existed in 1989? 🤷♂️
waterbeesje wrote on 2022-09-04, 17:00:
I'm in the in-between camp. Get it right and add a large Compact flash.
In the day I had or still have:
Ibm model 30: 20MB (plus CF on xt-ide coexisting)
Correct. My XT had a 20 MB MFM drive installed.
I liked the sound, but the capacity was insufficient.
At first, I tried to keep the drive by using Double Space compression. Which worked very well.
But even with drive compression, it wasn't enough.
40 MB and less aren't enough. Not enough to do anything meaningful.
Even back in my 286 days, 40 MB were hardly enough. I had to install/remove applications over time.
The reason is simple, development tools like Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic, and various C compilers go consume tens of megabytes easily.
If you add an installation of Windows or Geoworks Ensemble, the HDD is full very soon.
So as much as I'd like to agree, I can't. 20 MB isn't enough, except for playing Alley Cat and Monkey Island. 🙁
If you're an experimenter or artist (Deluxe Paint, Neo Paint etc), 80 MB is bare minimum.
Alternatively, a network drive is an option. Then, a 20 MB internal HDD is okay.
Edit: Or like in your solution, an extra CF drive.
Edit: I've forget some important detail here: disk utilities.
If you're remembering the 80s, you likely had a copy of PC-Tools installed.
However, versions before version 7.x did have issues with large hard disks.
I encountered the issue myself when I had been using Compress v6 on a big HDD running MS-DOS 6.22!
But the issue wasn't MS-DOS, really. On my 286-12, I had MS-DOS 6.20 running and Compress v6 ran fine (part of PC-Tools Deluxe).
That's interesting, because that 40 MB partition was exceeding FAT16 / the 32MB limit. I had used FAT16B, already.
So the issues aren't exactly FAT16 or FAT16B (Big FAT), but are somehow related to drive geometry or BIOS or IDE specs.
Maybe some register values were off or too large, not sure. 🤷♂️
So if you're into old Norton Diskette Editor, PC-Tools R4 or other dinosaurs, a small 20 MB HDD and MS-DOS 2.11, PC-DOS 3.30 or DR DOS might be a consideration.
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