HDD Configuration Question \ VOGONS

HDD Configuration Question

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First post, by athlon-power

Posted on 2019-07-27, 22:19

athlon-power Offline

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The SE440BX-2 is dead, so I've switched to my Gateway Tabor III for this project. Anyways, I have three vintage HDDs:

An 8GB Maxtor drive ca. 1998 that is so loud it overpowers both my window fans and my floor fan that's pointed right at me. It works, it's just that the whine of the motor spinning the platters is so loud that I think the bearings are bad or something else that is weird is going on.

A near-slient 4GB Quantum Bigfoot TX- the thing runs surprisingly quiet. I should mention that I don't care about noise as long as it won't drive me into madness 2 weeks after I've been playing games on the machine.

A Quantum Fireball CR 6.4AT 6.4GB HDD, ATA-66, too. I'll have to get an ATA-66 card to feel the full speed later on, but it's neat nonetheless.

So, I am probably not going to use the Maxtor. What I'm asking is probably down more to personal prefrence than anything else, but I can't decide at the moment. I didn't get to live in the late 90's, so I don't have the full scope of what was more common or less common.

Do I use dual HDDs (4GB Bigfoot + 6.4GB Fireball), using the 4GB drive as boot and the 6.4GB drive for games, or vice-versa, or do I only use one of them? (I will definitely use the Fireball if I only use one; more space and also faster R/W speeds)

Where am I?

Reply 1 of 3, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2019-07-28, 01:15

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If you have enough room use the Fireball as the boot drive and BigFoot as secondry/back drived. Also BigFoots are good for for older systems such as XT-486s with XT-IDE/card/bios on nic installs or just using overlay software.

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Reply 2 of 3, by athlon-power

Posted on 2019-07-28, 02:47

athlon-power Offline

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Caluser2000 wrote:
If you have enough room use the Fireball as the boot drive and BigFoot as secondry/back drived. Also BigFoots are good for for older systems such as XT-486s with XT-IDE/card/bios on nic installs or just using overlay software.

Sounds good to me. It feels weird to do it "backwards," like that for me, because I like a nice gradient up in storage size, like 120GB for the primary and 200GB for the secondary or something like that, as a rough example. But from what I can tell, storage wasn't very abundant then, so you'd want your boot drive to have more storage, I guess.

I also have a brand-new IDE ZIP 100 drive that came with the software, box, and 3.5" to 5.25" adapter at a local flea market for USD$5. It also came with some Norton backup software that I might be able to use, so I got incredibly lucky with that find.

Where am I?

Reply 3 of 3, by chinny22

Posted on 2019-07-30, 10:18

chinny22 Offline

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As bigfoots are famous for been slow I wouldn't want to run Win9x on one, Dos would be ok and suspect games will be fine as well.

But back in the day isnt much different to now
Usually you would run out of space and install a 2nd drive for data, means you didn't have to reinstall everything.
or clean install and have the newer so probably faster drive to boot off and old drive became the "archive drive"

and you weren't wrong about lack of storage space, around 96 we upgraded our 486's 420MB drive with a 1GB drive, the 1GB was still partitioned and the 420GB was even doublespaced I was so desperate for space!

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