ThisOldTech wrote on 2021-05-14, 03:43:

Hey so I have a few machines I'm ready to part with that I've been building over the years. […]
Show full quote

Hey so I have a few machines I'm ready to part with that I've been building over the years.

I think the wife's probably annoyed by the 30+ machines I have sitting on shelves in my office and I may one day get it down to one socket type or genre per unit type thing.

Either way... so if I cleaned one up for sale like say a Pentium 100~233 model range Compaq or AST machine.

Do you think people would prefer it had a stock IDE - or do people prefer they have a CompactFlash drive for reliability?

I have a ton of new CFs and adapters as a result of an order from China that sent more than I ordered... so I was debating whether this one Compaq I already have a w95 install running come with that or whether I stick it's original 1GB back in.
I should also mention some of these drives have a few known bad sectors... but they don't seem to occur often. That was one reason I took the IDE out of one of them.

If a drive is under the 1GB size... I feel CF is a better option as the older ones (even stored in temperature, moisture and dust free zones) still seem to degrade quick.

Why not just offer the choice between HDD and CF card with adapter to the buyer ?

EDIT : Possibly with a small bit of text explaining the practical advantages of CF . And if you end up with spare working legacy drives, selling them separately would be an option .

darry wrote on 2021-05-14, 03:47:

Why not just offer the choice between HDD and CF card with adapter to the buyer ?

EDIT : Possibly with a small bit of text explaining the practical advantages of CF . And if you end up with spare working legacy drives, selling them separately would be an option .

Yeah... I suppose I could just include both actually. Maybe even just leave the old drive mounted inside if they really miss that sound!

I think the same.

Making the HDD optional also has the advantage that the buyer can't complain so much.

From what I have learned, not all vintage fans (or people in general) are the same or have conmon sense.

There are people out there that expect the 30+ years old hardware to work perfect,
as if bought new in the old days.

They're totally spoilt, no idea what's going on in their minds.

That reminds me of an old story about an acquaintance of my father.
The guy was looking for a pair of headphones for a vintage crystal radio set..
Well, my father knew a shop that sells them
The shop had the words "historic requisites" written in the name.

Now what happened? Right, after buying a headphones set, that said acquaintance complained and groused about rust and scratches. He essentially badmouthed the shop owner on CB radio and elsewhere.

He didn't understand that these headphones were -in terms of age- from the first two world wars! These were authentic, functional, requisites - not kids toys. What a jerk.
My father had to take a deep breathe and had to explain him the situation.

Edit: I forgot. That acquaintance was/is East German.
They are said to constantly complain, anyway.
I don't like stereotypes, but perhaps there's some truth within. 🙁

Thanks for that Jo22!

Man... I hear you 100% on the vintage thing. It's funny when you have to remind someone that the way things used to work wasn't as they remembered.

Yes, floppies go bad. Yes, errors come up and the hardware might actually be working the way it was made!!

Fascinating story about the headphones. Honestly if I saw something that old working in any condition I'd be happy to own it. My wife's got pressure canners and other household stuff she still uses from the 30s. They're not pretty but they work better than today's stuff!

When i put together yet another retro-pc and find a new retro-lover owner for it, my default is always CF card as hard drive. If there's a special request for spinning rust, i see what i can do, but that's out of normal approach.
I truly hate everything moving in my retro machines. I don't want to "wear down" old hardware just for my own pleasure. Going 100% solid state allows me to boot them up time-to-time and have some fun without regret. 😜

Worked so far. 😀

My default choice is CF. Durable, compatible, portable, small, but not so small that they get lost.

I've noticed that there seems to be 4 common groups of performance among CFs. There's:
* the old stuff - Example: Western Digital Silicon Drive. Probably was an average performer 10 years ago, but unexciting today. These probably have received a lot of writes in the past and are often stuck at lower ATA speeds, none of which may be an issue if you are attaching it to an ISA bus to run DOS, so whatever. Good enough.
* the generic industrials - Example: MemoryPartner "Straight outta Guangzhou/a cheap CF with an attitude" - These are great. New or used I've had a lot of good luck with these. They beat up the Sintechi SD adapters, punch it out with the best DOMs and are competitive with low end buffered SSD's.
* new spec consumer stuff - Example: Transcend "Made for modern cameras" - These boast transfer rates of 133 and higher, but they don't perform well on PCs. Could be that the Transcends & Lexars I got on line were all are counterfeit, but I have quite a few and they seem similar. Perhaps the newest consumer CF's require an ATA-8 controller to unlock their performance. They have all had decent throughput but higher than expected access times (> 0.5ms) Maybe they are not tuned for low latency.
* total garbage - Every so often I get a CF device from ebay is awful. Those are likely used & abused or bad stock dumped on ebay with a fake brand on it. Access times > 30ms, total throughput < 2MB/s. So terrible that they start to get interesting.

Sample CF's, front and back:

16GB mSata and m2 Sata devices are also very nice at a similar price point to 2GB CFs, but they are a little more difficult to work with on retro computers because I have never seen an m2 or msata to 40pin adapter. I've always had to chain multiple adapters together to get them into a retro build, and one of those adapters needs a sata/pata converter in it. Different sata/pata converters can affect negotiated ATA protocols, seek times, and total throughput. Sample mSata with two adapters:

I tested using SPEEDSYS on an MSI Nforce2 Motherboard with BIOS that supports UDMA in DOS (Athlon 2500+ CPU)

I included a Quantum Fireball CX, which is pretty much a "best case" vintage hard drive that I wanted to have back in the day.
I included a Maxtor 7540 AV, which is a lot closer to what I actually had to work with back in the day

1                     WD Silicon   Generic 2GB  Transcend   SanDisk     Kingston      6GB Quantum   Maxtor 
2                     Drive  2GB   Industrial   133x 4GB    Msata 16GB  M2 Sata 16GB  Fireball CX   7540 AV
3Negotiated ATA       DMA 2        UDMA 4       UDMA 4      UDMA 6      UDMA 5        UDMA 4        ATA
4Random access time   0.28 ms      0.19 ms      0.93 ms     0.44 ms     0.24 ms       15.30 ms      27.98 ms
5Linear read speed    5988 KB/s    33209 KB/s   13613 KB/s  64435 KB/s  71914 KB/s    16228 KB/s    2110 KB/s
6Linear write speed   3653 KB/s    11686 KB/s   5091 KB/s   50184 KB/s  33685 KB/s    18741 KB/s    977 KB/s
7Buffered read speed  6033 KB/s    33616 KB/s   18127 KB/s  58439 KB/s  71014 KB/s    53846 KB/s    5825 KB/s

Yes, the solid state devices often have slightly better linear read speed than buffered read speeds.

p.s. if your controller supports > UDMA 2, consider this mod: Re: UDMA 5 with DOM's & CF's

Edit: fixed some typos and some phrasing

@Douglar - GREAT info!!

I too have had incredible luck with the industrial chinese CF's
I've also noticed incredibly good speed on CF-IDE over any other drive no matter how good the quality.
The convenience of pulling them and adding stuff via card reader is also far more convenient than burning CDs

I prefer SD cards mostly because I don't have any CF readers. I can simply unplug it and insert it into my surface pro if needed. Downside is the less appealing form factor (they are friggin tiny) and I have yet to see any on the shelf solutions for an 2.5 slot so you kind of need to be inventive.

Joakim wrote on 2021-05-15, 08:32:

I prefer SD cards mostly because I don't have any CF readers. I can simply unplug it and insert it into my surface pro if needed. Downside is the less appealing form factor (they are friggin tiny) and I have yet to see any on the shelf solutions for an 2.5 slot so you kind of need to be inventive.

Yah I haven't really "invested" in CF much yet, just got one decent sized card and adapter, which is most likely to end up as a 2.5" drive replacement. I have been wondering if I was better off going the SD card route for everything else, since CF seem to be getting thin on the ground.

I mean it all depends on who you're selling to. Personally I use mechanical hard drives in everything but it seems like all the pootube influencers are pushing solid state

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-05-15, 15:45:

I mean it all depends on who you're selling to. Personally I use mechanical hard drives in everything but it seems like all the pootube influencers are pushing solid state

Same for me. I'm always annoyed with those videos when they restored something and go "ok, now I'll replace this perfectly working hard drive with a CF because the HDD is unreliable and will fail". So what if it fails? If it's working fine why not just use it until it croaks, it's not like you will be storing critical data on it. And then you can replace it with whatever you have at hand.

Personally I find it much cheaper to get old hard drives for free that people would throw away otherwise, at this point I have enough of them so that if one breaks it can be easily replaced without spending a dime. I just avoid the noisiest ones, and the slower speed vs solid state solutions doesn't bother me at all, it's not like they are cassettes on an 8-bit micro!

Going back to the OP's question, a retro PC with a working (somewhat) period-accurate HDD would be more valuable to me. But then again I tend to prefer buying stuff from people that just want to get rid of old PCs instead of paying the premium for something that was specifically targeted to retro-enthusiasts. So given that I'm not sure if my opinion is worth anything in this case.

Yes especially when they pull a perfectly working MFM drive or an early stepper IDE to replace with a stupid memory card

TheMobRules wrote on 2021-05-15, 16:41:

Same for me. I'm always annoyed with those videos when they restored something and go "ok, now I'll replace this perfectly worki […]
Show full quote

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-05-15, 15:45:

I mean it all depends on who you're selling to. Personally I use mechanical hard drives in everything but it seems like all the pootube influencers are pushing solid state

Same for me. I'm always annoyed with those videos when they restored something and go "ok, now I'll replace this perfectly working hard drive with a CF because the HDD is unreliable and will fail". So what if it fails? If it's working fine why not just use it until it croaks, it's not like you will be storing critical data on it. And then you can replace it with whatever you have at hand.

Personally I find it much cheaper to get old hard drives for free that people would throw away otherwise, at this point I have enough of them so that if one breaks it can be easily replaced without spending a dime. I just avoid the noisiest ones, and the slower speed vs solid state solutions doesn't bother me at all, it's not like they are cassettes on an 8-bit micro!

Going back to the OP's question, a retro PC with a working (somewhat) period-accurate HDD would be more valuable to me. But then again I tend to prefer buying stuff from people that just want to get rid of old PCs instead of paying the premium for something that was specifically targeted to retro-enthusiasts. So given that I'm not sure if my opinion is worth anything in this case.

While HDDs are cheaper, solid state is just significantly faster, and not in the way that would impact how a game would perform which would make the system unbalanced. It gives some peace in the mind that the new media is unlikely to fail compared to literal spinning rust. If you know where to look, solid state stuff isn't that much more expensive than mechanical hard drives, even including adapters.
Additionally, CF cards weren't targeted towards retro-enthusiasts, since the IDE adapters were probably used with laptops in the mid-2000s for cheap drive upgrades, or as a way to access files from a camera/camcorder using the cards.

My main issue with old hard drives is noise . A nice quiet humming sound with some clicking/chirping is not unpleasant, but the sound of worn out ball bearings is intolerable to me (I have lived through enough of it already to last me a life time).

Personally I would not really care if there were any drives in it at all but that's just me. If you have spare drives I would sell them with drives in them as I think you will attract more customers for a complete computer.

Mah. I have plenty of good '90s era hdds that haven't failed.

I'm bringing a 486DX/2-50 which was a Workgroups server back in the day. The double height 3.5" IDE 500 something meg hdd fires up just fine and dandy.

Pretty much all computers I have that use a drive that is smaller than 20GB has a CF in it. For 20GB and upwards, I have enough IDE drives to spare, and they can be limited to 32GB via jumpers most of the time. I find that Windows 9x is not that great on a CF-IDE to begin with.

I support SD2IDE and CF2IDE stuff if you don't care about being 100% era-accurate. if all you want to do is play games, i don't see the huge deal.

If I had to guess I'd assume the average person who buys a complete system off eBay is someone starting out and not yet ready to hunt down specific parts.
As others have said, seems like a CF conversion is one of the first things everyone does so may as well get it out the way for them.

Unless you don't really want the HDD's in which case if the listing is for spinning rust then that's what your getting. It's still better then no drive which plenty of people sell.

Personally on dos PC's I prefer spinning rust for boot and OS drive and CF for games/data/etc best of both. Everyone's different so no matter which you do some will still change it to their taste.