IDE to CF adaptors and CompactFlash cards seem to be the way to go. I have a 4GB CF card in my 486's - their BIOSes support this, though it may be possible to do that anyway with Drive Overlay (Like AnyDrive etc) otherwise, 512MB CF cards certainly exist and they are not very expensive.

They generally perform very quickly in MS-DOS, though if you run Windows and multi-task heavily it is possible that you will notice the odd spike in performance as it waits to wake up a different area of the card.

HighTreason wrote:

IDE to CF adaptors and CompactFlash cards seem to be the way to go. I have a 4GB CF card in my 486's - their BIOSes support this, though it may be possible to do that anyway with Drive Overlay (Like AnyDrive etc) otherwise, 512MB CF cards certainly exist and they are not very expensive.

They generally perform very quickly in MS-DOS, though if you run Windows and multi-task heavily it is possible that you will notice the odd spike in performance as it waits to wake up a different area of the card.

They seem like an interesting idea but wouldn't you wear them out relatively quickly using them as a main hard drive? I know that's the case with USB flash drives. Had 2 running Pfsense on my router box and they both died within a month. My fault though since I didn't run the version that puts the filesystem into read only mode. After I used the Pfsense image made for flash drives it has lasted 4 months so far and is still trucking nicely.

This is mainly going to be a DOS machine so I don't expect writes to be too heavy. My only concern is that this is one of those motherboards without autodetect and I had to manually configure the drive. The system is in storage until end of month and I'm trying to find any records I kept on brand/model, but I'm coming up blank right now.

CF cards via IDE to CF adapters are tried and tested, used by lots of people here on Vogons. There are lots of options apart from autodetect. You can just set 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors if you're happy with a 504 MiB drive, or use DDO software to access much larger partitions. Using MS-DOS 7.1, I installed a 32 GB CF card onto a 386: https://youtu.be/sI7U9LYbt28

For DDO software:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/maxtor.html

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/samsung.html

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/seagate1.html

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/western-digital1.html

Another option are newer SATA drives and SATA to IDE adapters, or PCI SATA controllers. But I tend to use these on Socket 7 machines or faster. For a 486 and MS-DOS I prefer to use CF cards.

+1 for CF. I use them in my retro rig. They key is finding the right quality CF card. One side benefit of going this route, it makes it trivial to pop the card into another computer and make an image of the drive for backup purposes. Even easier if your adapter is in a 3.5" external bay.

CF cards and DOMs are indeed the way to go.

DOMs are designed to operate as permanent storage in computers, so (especially industrial ones) have a descent lifespan. Not that I care much about it for a retro computer, just saying.
When it comes to Windows systems make sure to allign the partition correctly, exactly like we used to do with the early SSDs and Windows XP. You'll be surprised by the difference it makes and, based on my personal observations, people tend not to do it 😉

Even CF cards are not a bad option, considering that one can always use some DDO software on older machines and have the benefit of using a faster, cheaper and widely available card.

Another approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Systems#DiskOnChip

Personally I've made quite good experiences using CF/SD to IDE adapters - I'd name them the way to go.

CF cards are nice, but make sure you get a good one with trim. The cheaper ones do not last long.

I tried a CF for DOS once, and started getting write errors on the 3rd time I reinstalled a game that I was having trouble with. Nothing else had been done with it. I suppose that was just bad luck, but it did reinforce my lack of trust in the number of rewrite cycles Flash manufacturers claim their chips to be good for. That card quoted 100K cycles - 100,000 is a long way from 3. I never found Flash cards on game consoles very impressive either, they fail frequently. Most of my SD cards for my camera have been okay, but they've probably only been overwritten about 20 times so that doesn't mean much.

If I try the CF thing again, I'm going to break it into partitions so if 1 partition fails I can easily move to the next. But really, I'd be more inclined to go shopping for old SCSI drives. I haven't done that anytime recently though, so maybe they're all dying off at this point.

I can't say I've tried using a larger(younger) IDE drive on a 486, but I think you could just use a manufacturer utility to limit their size to something the 486 board (or a suitable, slightly newer controller card) will tolerate. I don't know if size limiting is enough, or if that leaves any other compatibility problems.

IIRC all SanDisk cards support Wear leveling.
Transcend's Industrial Grade CF cards also support Wear leveling. http://www.transcend-info.com/About/press/1584

fyy wrote:

They seem like an interesting idea but wouldn't you wear them out relatively quickly using them as a main hard drive? I know that's the case with USB flash drives.

Modern file systems like NTFS and ext3/4 are much harder on disk writes than old file systems like FAT16/32. You probably wouldn't want to defragment it every day, though.

you never, ever want to defragment flash memory, it needlessly adds write cycles to the disk for zero benefit.

I believe an industrial-grade MLC DOM or SSD should give the best performance in Windows.

One question... How low in capacity, can one make a Samsung or Seagate HDD, using Sea-Tools?
If the answer is sub 425mb, then go for that, as a possible solution (doing all that SATA to PATA conversion stuff)

504 MiB was the lowest I tried...

+1 for CF2IDE adapters - currently I'm using one adapter as secondary drive in my PC with FreeDOS, together with 2GB CF (and a common hard-disk set to master) - I'm planning to use another one with my Amiga 600. The model I'm using is one of those with rear bracket (they cost less).

wear on standard CF cards should be minimal on a DOS only PC, as there is no swap files. Once you get the PC all set up the only writing done to the disk is savegames.
You do have to align your partitions though for best results. Something I keep meaning to get around to doing... bad me!

personally I like hearing a real HDD on start up so have one of whatever size with dos installed plus use for anything temporary. All my games, data, etc are on the CF card on the 2nd IDE channel

That's the one thing with them. Everyone misses the sound the drive makes.

I wonder how hard it would be to get a dead drive, make it spin and drive the servo from the IDE LED? If done correctly, perhaps converting the signal to rapid pulses, you'd have the authentic hard drive noise... Though it would be woefully inefficient.

Check out your local Craigslist: sometimes you can bulk op on IDE HDDs cheap. That is what I do. I dislike out of era workarounds personally. 🤣