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.

I replace hard drives with CF cards on most of my old machines when the old drives fail. I do try to use the original ones that came with the machine\bought-back-in-the-day till they stop working or at-least try to if they are not making the trademark old worn out ball bearing whine sound that you can hear from many rooms away.

When I do use a modern hard drive with my old computers, its with a PCI Sata controller, so I can use a large hard drive in 9x without file corruption on such a drive. I don't see the point in limiting them, use a IDE to CF adapter and a CF card if size is a problem, actually use both keep the swap file and temp dirs on the large TB drives saving the CF card from more wear, but getting the read speeds from it while being able to boot from the onboard IDE controller, and enjoy a ton of hard drive space too 😈 .

I'be acquired some older IDE drives of this sort. I always do a low-level format on them, which always seems to resurrect clusters it thought were bad. But no SMART abilities is annoying.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Are we talking IDE?

I was, but we can include SCSI. I totally forgot my Mac drives.

Logistics wrote:

which always seems to resurrect clusters it thought were bad.

I haven't used Windows seriously since 98SE, but what I remember of the old disk utilities makes me think they didn't understand sector reallocation at all. Or maybe those apps really were just completely capricious garbage.

Badblocks is nice if you haven't used it. The default wipes writes a bit-flipping four patterns:
10101010
01010101
11111111
00000000

I have a bunch of ~20 old hard drives, the smallest being 42mb and the largest 10gb.
Even if half of them die, I'm still good! 😁
I won't waste a new hard drive in my old stuff and the cf cards are best fit in a dos only machine, because the way windows works it damages it. But then, what would a 486 system be without HEARING the hard disk drive loading stuff? 😀

At least they're not solid state. I personally prefer metal over 100000 write limits.

Spending an afternoon setting up an OS and then having the HD die is annoying. If you must use old drives then some sort of RAID arrangement is recommended.

why? just make an image backup of the whole Hard drive once you done.

Simpler to have mirrored drives from the outset.

I've somehow lost my 3 oldest drives (40MB, 250MB, 1.6GB). I think I must have stashed them somewhere and forgot that I did it. The 2 smallest of those are actually very quiet. When the 1.6GB turned out to be loud, I enjoyed that at the time. That 1.6GB was a lemon model which turned me against WD for a while. The 2 smaller drives were still working perfectly last I knew, which was, well.. a long time ago.
Sometimes when I'm downloading things from the internet, I'm reminded of the capacity of that 40MB hard drive. It amuses me how I will frivolously burn the entire capacity of that hard drive on some pointless youtube video. And if I was downloading to that drive, the drive would be the bottleneck to my downloading speed.

My favorite sounding drives are the 4.3GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda and IBM SCSI drives. But out of 3 such drives I have, I think 2 of them are bad.
I have a 10K rpm 9.1GB Seagate Cheetah, but it doesn't sound as pleasing to me. It's just loud. It's pretty cool to listen to with a screwdriver though, when listening that way, it sounds like a thunderstorm is going on in there.

Haven't done much with CF drives. I tried DOS on a Kingston, and it started giving errors after my 3rd rewrite, no exaggeration. So much for the 100K write cycles. I was going to try a carefully modified install of WinXP on a Transcend CF card, but never got the modifications down to the point of actually switching to the CF. I'll probably try 1 of those Transcends in DOS next time I put a DOS machine together.

I recently benchmarked almost all of my old hard drives with HDTune and HDTach on ABIT NF7-S V2.0 motherboard. Ranges from 130MB to 80GB - IDE only hdds. Will upload the results somewhere soon.

This is where some are stored:

You can still get NOS drives on ebay but they are getting harder to find and more expensive. Maxtor drives are my favorites and I have used them whenever possible in my retro builds from DOS 6.22 through to XP.

Earlier this year I landed a lot of 4 NOS Western Digital IDE (32gb) drives off ebay, and am keeping them them in storage. Managed to nab a used one (2.1gb) at a second hand store for $1 (one dollar) and was somewhat surprised that it was in perfect working condition and have it in my DOS 6.22 machine where it has performed faithfully for almost a year with zero issues.

Here is a 20gb Hitachi 7200 rpm 3.5" drive for $13 not including worldwide shipping from US.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-HITACHI-IC35L020A … =item2c857681af

And a 40gb for $15

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hitachi-IC35L040AVVN0 … =item1e90f46cce

Maxtor drives are my favorites

40 Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 8 6E040L0. What is it about these drives? They are invincible.

Tricky bit: not the identical name-number drives that look like Fireballs. Those are normal mortal drives. But the true Plus 8 in size 40, just how did the the stars align for that production run?

At the moment, nearly all my Retro Rigs are running with 120 gigabyte Seagate Harddrives.
I have just modded them to "32 Gig Clip's", using SeaTools.
Why 120G drives from Seagate? Well... Really low noise, and they do not run hot at all.
Plus they deliver some good performance in Win9x and Dos.

When they die, I'll be moving on to Seagate/Samsung SATA drives, were I will be modding
them to 32G drives, using seatools, and connect them using Sata to Pata converters.

I keep a large amount of old IDE and SCSI drives on the shelf for projects. Still have a few working MFM drives too but none spare. Everything gets tested as working no bad sectors or it gets recycled.

Never really like the RLL/MFM drives but I still like the sound of a real hard drive seeking when in use.

brostenen wrote:

When they die, I'll be moving on to Seagate/Samsung SATA drives, were I will be modding
them to 32G drives, using seatools, and connect them using Sata to Pata converters.

Hehe good to hear 😊

I made a few more findings. Vetz mentioned he used SeaTools to create a ~ 120 GB drive.

So I made a video showing how to create a 137GB drive to maximise Windows 98SE storage (without hacked drivers).

Now this trick allows you to create ANY sized drive. Of interest are:

60 or 64 GB because this is the limit before fdisk and format start not displaying correct number. It's purely cosmetic, but some might have an issue with this.

To work out the number of sectors (Each sector has 512 bytes) you need to enter into SeaTools you got to do a bit of math.

To create a 128 GiB (or 138 GB) drive you will need 128 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 to convert to bytes then divide by 512 to get your 268435456 sectors.

I just mucked around with 386 gear and tried creating a 504 MiB drive. But the boards wouldn't work with it. Only a newer Socket 7 board would accept such a drive. Wasted the entire afternoon 😒

So for 386 and 486 pure DOS machines: I stick with CF cards. Hands down the "best" solution in terms of price / compatibility / performance / easy of use.

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.

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.

The problems really start if the BIOS supports LBA and if it does some always auto detection. As long as you can enter things manually, you can just stay in BIOS limits. Sometimes a workaround is to disable hdd auto detection before you connect the HDD and enter lower values manually.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Hehe good to hear :blush: […]
Show full quote

Hehe good to hear 😊

I made a few more findings. Vetz mentioned he used SeaTools to create a ~ 120 GB drive.

So I made a video showing how to create a 137GB drive to maximise Windows 98SE storage (without hacked drivers).

Now this trick allows you to create ANY sized drive. Of interest are:

60 or 64 GB because this is the limit before fdisk and format start not displaying correct number. It's purely cosmetic, but some might have an issue with this.

To work out the number of sectors (Each sector has 512 bytes) you need to enter into SeaTools you got to do a bit of math.

To create a 128 GiB (or 138 GB) drive you will need 128 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 to convert to bytes then divide by 512 to get your 268435456 sectors.

I just mucked around with 386 gear and tried creating a 504 MiB drive. But the boards wouldn't work with it. Only a newer Socket 7 board would accept such a drive. Wasted the entire afternoon 😒

So for 386 and 486 pure DOS machines: I stick with CF cards. Hands down the "best" solution in terms of price / compatibility / performance / easy of use.

Actually....
The reason why I am using SeaTools, are you'r nice and really good video's on youtube.
The reason why I found out, was that I needed a HDD with a capacity lower than those 425 to 500 megabyte.
(never did manage to try it out, installed a new controller and 8GB drive in the P133)

I remembered that there was a jumper to change HDD size on the drives back in the years.
So. I thought that software might do the trick instead of a physical jumper.
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. 😀