PeterLI wrote:

In the US MB IDE HDDs are very common and cheap. IMO there is no reason to retrofit CF-IDEs et cetera. Yes: HDDs sometimes die but with MS-DOS machines a replacement HDD is up and running in minutes. Disclaimer: I rarely ever go beyond MS-DOS games.

At least for me, here in Australia, postage kills any cheap deals. I have a ton of SATA drives lying around, so it was natural to look for a solution that allowed me to use SATA drives.

elianda wrote:

Isn't the limiting only required for boards that use always auto detection where the BIOS may hang?
For 386/486 I just plug a large HDD and enter the maximum CHS values manually. These settings limit to 504 MB automatically. I don't have to limit the HDD itself.
If the BIOS already features HDD Auto Detection it is usually an extra menu. So if this would hang (I haven't seen this yet though) you could still enter it manually.

Yes. I just wanted to know if a 504 MB limited drive would work as I expected. Well it didn't but it's not a big loss. The 1024 / 16 / 63 settings work very well.

brostenen wrote:

After some search, I ended up locating you'r really nice time machine video's on youtube.
Or it could have been Victor Bart's video's, that made youtube tell me about you'r video's.
Can not remember.... Just glad I know about SeaTools now. 😀

Great to hear and exactly why I make these videos 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Great to hear and exactly why I make these videos 😀

If only all the teachers that I have ever had, was that good at learning me stuff.
I would have been a great deal wiser as of today. 🤣

I love those old large ones.
My wish is to own one of those old IBM drives with clear top casing.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Are we talking IDE?

I've played around with all sorts of storage options and, at least for me, getting old drives is quite difficult. They are also noisy and can be unreliable or will die one day if used too much.

You can turn a Seagate drive into any sized drive with SeaTools. For SATA drive just use a SATA to IDE adapter and you're set.

Do SATA to IDE adapters actually work on older systems? I have one and I have yet to get it working on anything older than a P4. Also, IDE offers 2 channels, if you use a converter, you usually only get 1 SATA port in exchange.

Someone mentioned Maxtors, and they are very reliable drives, not just certain models. I've owned about 20 over the years and none of them ever died on me, not even ebay-bought ones.

I did have one malfunction in a strange way: it remained useable but with a very low data transfer rate (variable, but around ATA-25). I used it in a DOS gaming box for several years, where low speed wasn't an issue, and it worked fine. I eventually got rid of it though.

What could have caused this error? Was the drive designed to fall back to this low speed if some serious but non-fatal hardware error occurred? Good piece of design if so. It would give the user the ability to recover their files from a drive that would normally be completely dead.

Wish the rest of my Maxtors had lasted like those 40s. I'm afraid that here the other sizes have contributed to the paperweight pile as heavily as other brands. Only those 40s still stand as functioning & no bad sectors.

Come to think of it, they may be the only still-good IDE drives I have that are bigger than 3gb.

Curious: when you say "none of them ever died" do you mean outright failure, or do you include retirement due to bad sectors? My retired Maxtors are a mix of sectors and outright failures.

Just checking notes, and does look like none of the failed Maxtors refused to spin. They just exhibited other bizarre troubles. But none of them fully bricked, making data recovery impossible.

EDIT: right, did a head count. I'm somewhat appalled to find 41 drives in the house. Probably missed no more than two. About a quarter are still good. Smallest is an IBM 20mb.

Catastrophic outright failure. My drives were a mixture of Diamondmaxes and Maxlines, of all sizes. Though I didn't keep them all to the end, most were eventually given away or sold, so maybe other people got my share of bad luck. I still have 7 in good working condition.

Edit: bad sectors are very rare in my drives, I don't know why. I think it's because I've always run them in fan-cooled enclosures (since c.2001 all my builds have used them). When my drives malfunction at all, it's usually total failure.

These things: http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=42

I have about 30 of them.

Totempole wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Do SATA to IDE adapters actually work on older systems? I have one and I have yet to get it working on anything older than a P4. Also, IDE offers 2 channels, if you use a converter, you usually only get 1 SATA port in exchange.

Of course!

My latest review: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/storage-reviews.html

I use them in all my projects. A wide range of Socket 7, Super Socket 7, Slot 1, Socket 370 boards. With P4, you get SATA through the chipset (865 chipset).

Anything older and I usually use CF cards, but these adapters should work just as well.

Some adapters have master / slave jumpers, some come with 2 SATA ports. For example in this guide: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos--windows- … -gaming-pc.html I'm using a IDE to dual SATA, one for the HDD, one for the optical drive.

I can`t stand the noise of the old drives and more importantly: how it slows my systems down.

Modern drives are way faster so the bare minimum i use is a 80gb 7200rpm drive. I have these with ide so no problems there (just limited to 32gb on the oldest systems).

I have an old 4gb bigfoot which i love, but that is because of how the drive looks, not the way it performs 😎

It's funny, ever since I started my retro PC journey I never had an IDE drive. Always used modern alternatives. Only recently a friend gave me real 20 GB and 80 GB IDE drives 😀

But now with SeaTools I can just create whatever drive I want / need 🤣

Probably missed no more than two.

Although technically that lovely thing came from an IBM 320H.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

But now with SeaTools I can just create whatever drive I want / need 🤣

Oh you kidz and your crazy emulators 🤣

Still miss snapping the two 5.25 floppies into the ][e to get started. That was every bit as good as coffee. There is something about /tactile/ that is irreplaceable. Same reason I decided to preserve a particular pair of AT cases because they used the just right sort of heavy duty toggle switch.

* Okay, I'm an idiot -- is there no way to have the pics uploaded to Vogons show up in whole or as thumbs? I feel like such a Homer that all my pics only show as download links.

20+ year old hard drives are too unreliable to use safely. Even if it seems to be working fine now, age will eventually catch up with it. You'll power up your vintage gaming rig one day, it will boot to BIOS then freeze because it can't find the hard drive anymore. Better not to take chances because recovering old hard drives sucks (assuming they aren't so worn out that data recovery is even still possible).

pewpewpew wrote:

* Okay, I'm an idiot -- is there no way to have the pics uploaded to Vogons show up in whole or as thumbs? I feel like such a Homer that all my pics only show as download links.

Nope. What I do is upload the images to imgur, then choose the size of the image, grab the direct link, press the Img button and paste the direct link between the tags.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Of course! […]
Show full quote

Totempole wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Do SATA to IDE adapters actually work on older systems? I have one and I have yet to get it working on anything older than a P4. Also, IDE offers 2 channels, if you use a converter, you usually only get 1 SATA port in exchange.

Of course!

My latest review: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/storage-reviews.html

I use them in all my projects. A wide range of Socket 7, Super Socket 7, Slot 1, Socket 370 boards. With P4, you get SATA through the chipset (865 chipset).

Anything older and I usually use CF cards, but these adapters should work just as well.

Some adapters have master / slave jumpers, some come with 2 SATA ports. For example in this guide: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos--windows- … -gaming-pc.html I'm using a IDE to dual SATA, one for the HDD, one for the optical drive.

The ones I tried looked similar to this one. Obviously not very good.

Can you recommend a good converter for a reasonable price?

Thanks.

Well, not what you're after, but what I always do is buy a few cheap ones, but different models with different chips on them. I study the photos carefully. Some have a jumper, some don't. Some have a big chip, some a small one. You want a range of adapters to try out. The ones I settled on using are like the one in my latest video review. You plug it into the SATA HDD and the ribbon cable plus Molex cables plugs into the adapter. I found them to work the best. With the other ones, like in your image, I had many that suddenly just stopped working.

There seem to be two main brands of chips, J Micron and another one, something with Sun in the name. I forgot sorry.

They are really cheap, so get a few: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Newest-2-5-3-5-Dri … 73d74636&_uhb=1

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nope. What I do is upload the images to imgur,

Weird. I just checked and what I uploaded to Vogons in 2011 is displayed fine. Nothing apparently different in the code. Nothing appears to be related in User CP.

EDIT: I gave up and used the IMG tags around the address displayed for the file after uploading, then deleted the attachment. Total kludge. Would like to know why the Right Way isn't working.

EDIT 2: Nope! The server eventually notices that you deleted the attachment and deletes the img entirely. Can still do the IMG tag trick, but you have to leave the image attached at the bottom of the post. Terribly inelegant.

I use hard drives in all my retro rigs, don't see why not. I have a stack of old hard drives in storage - probably close to 20.

I enjoy using hard drives for my retro rigs,the sound and feeling of a hard drive,makes part of the retro fun.
Altough i admit neither of the drives i use are very old,2 40g from 2004 a Maxtor and a Western Digital and 1 80gb Western Digital from 2005,all of them are ide 100,7200rpm.
I'm not too worried about hard drive failure,becouse even if it ocures,i won't be loosing important data,i only using my retro rigs to test older hardware and play older games,so the hard drives don't contain important things.

I've always used hard drives on all my builds, and almost all are IDE - the only SATA hard drive is in my main rig (500GB WD Black). Some are recent (2006-2010), others are older (1997-2002). And I don't mind the noise and slow speeds at all. As for hard drive failure I agree with Nahkri, the data is not that important - if any of them fails then I'll just replace it with a spare, restore any backups I've made and continue on 😀

Way back, picked up a couple of new-looking ST351A/X drives from a computer fair or radio rally, very cheap.
On a system with an easy to use boot device menu, used one for trying out Caldera DOS alongside my existing setup.

VERY odd drives though, capable of AT or XT (8 bit) mode, and as the article says, a mix of old & new tech - a stepper motor mechanism, with a 3 zone density high capacity (for the time) platter.
http://redhill.net.au/d/16.php

I also picked up a 1.2GB Seagate for a fiver (back when a good one would have bee worth a fair bit more) - dead but with a few months warranty left, and as a replacement, got a refurb 1.7GB