AlessandroB wrote on 2025-09-11, 17:09:

OK, I'll consider these two solutions, even though I had some problems with a PCIe-IDE card I bought on Amazon. Which one would you recommend? Are there any better performing chips?

I haven't used a PCIe-to-IDE card, so I wouldn't be able to advise.

AlessandroB wrote on 2025-09-11, 11:38:

My requests to have everything native were because from times to restore, read, write images, use some diagnostic software having everything integrated natively I noticed that it worked better, especially the floppies. I had USB floppies but in addition to reading less than the old ones, as soon as they find a disk that dirty the heads they are to be thrown away and are unopenable, while in the old drives you can clean the heads and in any case I have a box full of spare parts.

You shouldn’t put disks in any drive if they have mold or for some reason serious dirt inside. You are only going to get drives destroyed that way.

Anyways, I’ve used USB floppy drive since like ages without any problems for exactly the use cases you listed, but I don’t insert junk discs into them. Greaseweazle is probably the right choice for you especially if you are serious about archiving and then you also probably want support for 5.25” drives also. Other USB-floppy adapters also exist and you can attach those to a regular drive. But I’d still get the greaseweazle because of the versatility.

As others mentioned, IDE can be achieved with a converter. I personally use an IDE to SATA converter to connect an IDE DVD drive with analog audio for DOS games. The BIOS has legacy IDE mode or the default AHCI.

The floppy connector is the real challenge IMO. Doubly-so if dual drive support is required.

The last build in my signature (HP Z400) is my daily Win11 workstation, and it happens also to be my fastest native DOS machine. My main line of work is 3D game programming, so lots of C++ compilation (hex-core 12-thread CPU, M.2 SSD) and heavy reliance on a decent 3D card for ray-tracing (RTX 2080Ti).
Of course it's not a thread-ripper, so not suitable for Unreal, but I don't use commercial engines.

To go DOS native, I just switch BIOS to IDE mode, and put a USB stick formatted to DOS 6.22. The BIOS boots from the USB as C drive, and I get access to A (floppy disk) and D (CD drive) with full sound blaster support and original OPL3.

The only caveat is no dual floppy drive. Even though I have both drives installed (5.25 and 3.5), I only can connect one at a time.. so I tend to batch my floppy disk work as 3.5" disk batches and 5.25" disk batches.

In DOS native mode, compatibility is really high. Doom and Duke3D are butter smooth. And SetMul L1D will bring down speed to 386 levels.. so some speed-sensitive games can also work.

I also have SATA drives that are disabled in BIOS by default, but if enabled, one has Win98 SE on it, and the other has WinXP. Both also work great but I rarely use them honestly.

What about those hp z8xx workstations? Floppy seems to work:

HP Z800 Time machine build

and some people seem to get win 11 running ?
(and should be faster than a z400 ?!)

Dual floppy drive is not a reuirement. The requirements are floppy drive and ide must wotk, even with a exhotic image/emulation software and a full range of port, serial, scsi, parallel, ps/2, firewire, usb…

Aui wrote on 2025-09-12, 09:31:

What about those hp z8xx workstations? Floppy seems to work: […]
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What about those hp z8xx workstations? Floppy seems to work:

HP Z800 Time machine build

and some people seem to get win 11 running ?
(and should be faster than a z400 ?!)

Yeah that was me as well 😅 The Z800 indeed can do all the retro stuff that the Z400 can (it has athe same BIOS almost). I ended up downgrading back to Z400 because Z800 was very noisy and produced heat like no tomorrow. It had dedicated fans on top of the memory modules, and it requires a stronger fan for the faster dual Xeons. This extra powerful fan is hard to find as OEM for a good price. If you don't install it, the machine will complain on each boot.. you can trick the mobo to believe you have the right fan installed.. but from the amount of heat I saw when using the system, I's say they're not joking.

Strangely, its case design is less roomy than the Z400. Fitting a 5.25" floppy drive in it was very difficult but worked in the end. It leaves not enough clearance for a deep drive like the typical 5.25" floppy drive.

Yes, so Im in exactly the same boat. I had a z820 and could not bear the noice. It was like some autum leaf blower. But a few weeks ago I found a z400 at a thrift store (10 bucks) with watercooling! It does not have a floppy drive yet, but I intend to put one in. If the OP can get such a machine for a good price, I recommend it. These machines seem to be very well build and probably as close as you ever get to a multiepoch PC.

and instead what would be the fastest motherboard/cpu combination that supports all the ports like my N68-S?

I tried to answer that at the beginning. N68-GS4 USB3 FX & 980DE3-U3S3 both take FX (AM3+) CPUs, although per online discussion the 125W support is dubious (so it's safer to stick to 95W like FX-6300).

In particular, the N68-GS4 USB3 FX is just an updated version of your current board, with DDR3 support, and USB 3.0 and SATA III onboard via external support chips as the chipset is so old.

None of this will give you Windows 11 support, and I think everyone's posts agree that's simply not possible. If the "free" year of ESU for Windows 10 is available in your region, that will at least let you defer this for another year.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-10, 19:39:

Oh of course. I was more curious about when things like FDD and IDE controllers were getting dropped from motherboards.

Even looking at industrial board options, it seems those features were getting dropped around the same time.

XP setup supporting some USB floppies aside, I wonder if floppy controllers disappear all at once because of the sudden irrelevance of the XP F6 disk thing (as 2014 soon approached) around that time.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-09-21, 18:05:

I tried to answer that at the beginning. N68-GS4 USB3 FX & 980DE3-U3S3 both take FX (AM3+) CPUs, although per online discussion the 125W support is dubious (so it's safer to stick to 95W like FX-6300).

In particular, the N68-GS4 USB3 FX is just an updated version of your current board, with DDR3 support, and USB 3.0 and SATA III onboard via external support chips as the chipset is so old.

None of this will give you Windows 11 support, and I think everyone's posts agree that's simply not possible. If the "free" year of ESU for Windows 10 is available in your region, that will at least let you defer this for another year.

I've given up on Windows 11 now, it works fine even with support for only 10. The important thing is compatibility (and the highest possible speed). Furthermore, it would also need to be compatible with Windows XP because I would need to be able to use the SCSI controllers to use the old SCSI disks (used in old MACs and Amigas) via the PCI controllers. I don't know if very new cards (always referring to their relative youth) are compatible with XP (which still has the SCSI drivers for the controllers while I think more modern systems no longer have them. Not to mention ZIP disks, LS120, etc., etc. My N68, although slow, works with everything.

A user here recommended the Fatal1ty Z77 Professional to me a while back (before I gave up on 11). It should be significantly faster than my current one.

AlessandroB wrote on 2025-09-21, 18:58:

A user here recommended the Fatal1ty Z77 Professional to me a while back (before I gave up on 11). It should be significantly faster than my current one.

Nice. I knew it was Sandy/Ivy Bridge timeframe on the Intel side. Seeing that board, I wish I had built my "bridge" machine in 2015 using that, instead of the 980DE3/U3S3.