KT7AGuy wrote:

Do you have a cheap source for those? All I can find are the StarTech units that sell for ~$30 each.

No, I bought the StarTech one. I paid about $22 from Amazon, shipped "free" through Prime. It works just fine, although the screw holes in the rails don't line up well with the 3.5" bay, so the drive is recessed a bit in the bay. Probably not a bad thing, because it prevents the microdrive from being accidentally pulled out.

boxpressed wrote:

KT7AGuy wrote:

Do you have a cheap source for those? All I can find are the StarTech units that sell for ~$30 each.

No, I bought the StarTech one. I paid about $22 from Amazon, shipped "free" through Prime. It works just fine, although the screw holes in the rails don't line up well with the 3.5" bay, so the drive is recessed a bit in the bay. Probably not a bad thing, because it prevents the microdrive from being accidentally pulled out.

Thanks for the info! I've got a bunch of old used 2.5" IDE laptop drives, so I think I'm gonna be OK for a long time. However, I'm looking ahead towards the day when IDE drives just get too old to work anymore, so I want to grab a few of those IDE-CF adapters now.

PCI-SATA under Win98 seems hit-or-miss.

boxpressed wrote:

I have a bunch of the Hitachi microdrives that I use with a CF-to-IDE adapter. I like it quite a lot, actually. Like badmojo, I use an adapter that is front-facing so that I can easily swap out drives (like cartridges) without opening the case. I use it with a DOS/Win98SE OEM box (Celeron 466). One microdrive is my DOS drive with all of my AWE64 initialization routines in the autoexec/config as well as games such as Duke 3D, Doom, Blood, Descent, etc. Another microdrive is my Win98SE drive with games such as Quake 2, Unreal, etc.[...]

Thanks for sharing your experience. 😀

KT7AGuy wrote:

Do you have a cheap source for those? All I can find are the StarTech units that sell for ~$30 each.

I've also not been able to find another source. The StarTech unit seems to be the only one. If you want a cheap alternative, there are CF adapters that go into one of the rear slots. The sell for maybe $5, but you will need to reach around the back to pull it out. Not a big deal IMO.

Another option is getting a 3.5" IDE drive bay and putting an adapter inside.

later ata133 drives are quite good if the MB can handle them, I'm using a seagate 40GB right now, with the 32GB jumper, on good controllers it gets almost 60MB/s linear and it's not a noisy drive, and it still is a lot younger than the 1990s HDs.

also, have anyone tried those cheap "kingspec" 8GB ide SSDs?

tayyare wrote:

GeorgeMan wrote:

I have a lot of old IDE disks around, so probably I'm ok for a decade or so considering the rate of HDDs going bad is low in my case, according to my experience.

What's a good storage solution if you have a lot of old hard drives? Stacked in shelves? I toppled about a dozen onto the floor a while ago. It got me thinking about alternatives.

How old are the drives?

For 3.5" drives there are a few types of plastic cases you can use. There's one that works a bit like some VHS tape cases, I use a stackable padded hard plastic case, and if money is no object there is also an aluminium case style carry box that will fit 10 disks. There are many alternatives too.

I'm not sure of options for 5.25" hard drives though - I only have one so I "store" it in a PC.

All 3.5". Early 90s to new. 40 MB to 2 TB. There are around 30 altogether.

That metal case is very cool, but I'd have to get 3 of them which is more than I want to spend on this.

Edit: mentioning VHS cases made me go see if they could be used for this. Almost perfect fit. There's a 2 inch space that needs filling, but a polystyrene cut-out should do it. I'll begin asking around if people have old VHS tapes they don't want.

I've bought a larger lot of 20GB laptop IDE drives (production year was 2006 I think?) and a large lot of laptop-IDE to desktop-IDE to match with the drives.

Because they are so new, they are very rapid and very silent (I find them to be very fast en very silent, perhaps the best 20GB drives I ever seen or ever not being able to hear 😁

They also were a lot cheaper (I did post about them some years ago and I don't have all the details in memory anymore), perhaps €6 each or so.

I found these excellent! 😁

The only gripe with them is the adapter connecting the drive to the ribbon cable, which needs a little TLC to stay connected (it's not a firm fit), so every time I move one of these systems around the house, I'll always take a quick peek inside to see if they are still in place.

I must be nuts but a big part of retro systems for me is the old drives, the sounds are just really special for me, I recently got a lovely old Fujitsu M2611T 40 MB IDE drive, to me it's a work of art, really well engineered, one of those perfect bits of Japanese engineering from the early 90's see the redhill entry here:http://redhill.net.au/d/137.php I also have a very high end Conner CP3501 500MB drive from the same era, this was a stupidly expensive & huge drive at the time, I am very fond of this old beast, it's 3.5inch double height drive, again I just love how it sounds and behaves. I'm pretty sure a lot of the retro magic would be lost for me if I used solid state drives despite the ease, convenience and price advantage.

Tetrium wrote:

The only gripe with them is the adapter connecting the drive to the ribbon cable, which needs a little TLC to stay connected (it's not a firm fit), so every time I move one of these systems around the house, I'll always take a quick peek inside to see if they are still in place.

These probably cost more than what you are using but they don't come off.
There are several places that sell them. Different lengths too. This is just an example.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/111750508111

2fort5r wrote:

What's a good storage solution if you have a lot of old hard drives? Stacked in shelves? I toppled about a dozen onto the floor a while ago. It got me thinking about alternatives.

I put them in these HDD clamshells. They are anti-static and keep the dust away. http://www.ebay.com/itm/221951973114
I then put them in boxes of 10 or 12 drives and put them on a shelf.
A label on the box tells me what is in it so I don't have to go through all the boxes to find what I need.
.
With a bit of anti-stat bubble wrap or foam (to take up space) they can hold two laptop drives.
They also work well for storing RAM when you have more than a few sticks of the same thing.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

These probably cost more than what you are using but they don't come off. There are several places that sell them. Different len […]
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Tetrium wrote:

The only gripe with them is the adapter connecting the drive to the ribbon cable, which needs a little TLC to stay connected (it's not a firm fit), so every time I move one of these systems around the house, I'll always take a quick peek inside to see if they are still in place.

These probably cost more than what you are using but they don't come off.
There are several places that sell them. Different lengths too. This is just an example.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/111750508111

That's actually better than the ones I bought back then. And even though they are cheap, I probably won't be needing any more.

PCBONEZ wrote:

I put them in these. They are anti-static and keep the dust away. http://www.ebay.com/itm/221951973114 I then put them in boxes […]
Show full quote

2fort5r wrote:

What's a good storage solution if you have a lot of old hard drives? Stacked in shelves? I toppled about a dozen onto the floor a while ago. It got me thinking about alternatives.

I put them in these. They are anti-static and keep the dust away. http://www.ebay.com/itm/221951973114
I then put them in boxes of 10 or 12 drives and put them on a shelf.
A label on the box tells me what is in it so I don't have to go through all the boxes to find what I need.
.
With a bit of anti-stat bubble wrap or foam (to take up space) they can hold two laptop drives.
They also work well for storing RAM when you have more than a few sticks of the same thing.
.

I have several of those larger foam-like thingies roughly the size of a computer panel. It's basically a hard foam brick with 3 rows of around 15 or so slots for a same number of harddrives each. If I had more, I could use a second one and place it on top of the filled first one (they are symmetrical). This would make it even possible to tape the 2 halves together and have the entire thing shipped while keeping the harddrives protected from shock damage.

I can't remember where I got them from though, but it is most likely I somehow found them and I remember never having bought them.

Alas, thus I have no clue as to what name these things have.

Tetrium wrote:

I have several of those larger foam-like thingies roughly the size of a computer panel. It's basically a hard foam brick with 3 rows of around 15 or so slots for a same number of harddrives each. If I had more, I could use a second one and place it on top of the filled first one (they are symmetrical). This would make it even possible to tape the 2 halves together and have the entire thing shipped while keeping the harddrives protected from shock damage.

I can't remember where I got them from though, but it is most likely I somehow found them and I remember never having bought them.

Alas, thus I have no clue as to what name these things have.

I have a few of those but mine are 1 row of 10 drives IIRC.
I get them sometimes when I buy drives in bulk, as in that's what the seller shipped them in.
I have rarely seen them for sale and when i have they were mucho expensive so I passed.
.
I use them mostly when I have to transport a bunch of drives in the car.
.

I'm new to building retro machines, and just about to build my first one. Are those IDE disks that rare? I'm going to build a Pentium MMX socket 7 machine, and I thought to eventually get a Seagate 7200.7 series — an IDE disk with 7200 rpm and 40GB options still on the market (not sure if my motherboard will have an LBA patch). Will that not work?

Yes. Even if you have BIOS issues these low capacity HDDs had jumpers to limit them to 32GB.

I found a CF IDE adapter and it has no ICs on the pcb. Are they so easily directly connected to the IDE connector or I just have a cheap one?
And what about using new CF 100MB/s card? Are they faster than real UDMA33/66 disks?

CF cards use the ATA interface, so the adapter is, for the most part, just that: an adapter.
Oh, and beware that comparing performance isn't that simple. CF cards tend to have lower writing performance, so they are better for DOS disks than for Windows 9x ones.

Also, some CF cards are hard jumpered to appear as removable drives instead of fixed disks (hard drives) in Windows.

Thank. How to know which kind of CF card I should buy without the removable trick? They are not that easy to find in shops lately.