darry wrote on 2021-05-15, 17:43:

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).

Yeah, having your desk INSIDE the server room with those 15k rpm scsi drives is no fun I can tell you. I consider it a small miracle my hearing wasn't impaired...

I have a drawer with a bunch of IDE hard drives of various capacities (mostly somewhere from 8 to 200-ish GB) and most of the earlier ones are just so unbearably loud that i've had to put an extra sticker on those to really never use them unless i need to demonstrate to someone why i'm not using those.
For authenticity nothing beats the seeking and clacking noise of a HDD but a permanent metallic whirring sound that is louder than all of my other hardware on full thrust combined is unbearable for use in a living room.
The silent ones are fine and i'm glad to use them.

I guess they have always been about this loud, worn out or not, because silent PCs were not invented before 2003-ish apparently.
I remember getting a Pentium4-PC from a discounter back in the day that had 2 level fan control (almost off and 100%, threshold at 55°C - go figure) but they also slapped in some geforce FX graphics card with a tiny heatsink and a tiny fan permanently going at 100%, super annoying. Shortly after, silent PCs became a thing and i'm thankful for that, but 90s machines? Nobody cared at the time. Especially not manufacturers & vendors.

imho, CF cards are great and better than HDDs. At least for DOS things. win98 however is no fun on CF/SD. I've tried. SATA-SSD via IDE adapter is much better, 120GB SSD is crazy cheap, maxes out pretty much every adapter and IDE bus out there, doesn't require capacity hacks to work with win98, and is super fast too.

TL;DR solid state all the things. no regrets. ok, a little. i miss the seek sounds.

i miss the seek sounds.

There must have been someone programming an emulator of some sort. I do remember seeing a harddisk activity indicator on my screen, be it DOS or windows, I forgot.

Hehe ,emulating hdd sounds.. Like how they started making electric vehicles that do make some noise or pedestrians don't always hear them coming.
That would be kinda neat though.... Though who needs another TSR in DOS?

I love keeping my XT/286 type rarer machines period accurate if they're still functional. Like the Commodore PCIII 40... but the 20-40mb IDEs are loud and pretty unreliable... One of mine has an actual ARM you can see spin the spindle on the outside of the drive!

The C64 ultimate carts have an audio jack connector where you can plug in speakers. For emulated floppy sounds. it's kinda neat. So the idea is certainly not new but i'm not aware that anyone has done this for HDDs.
Probably that cask of wine hasn't aged enough just yet 😜

I accidentally put the CF power cable next to the PC speaker today. It gave a reasonable approximation of early 90's hard drive noise. It makes the clicky seek noises and even has something that sounds like a spin-up noise.

Hard drive vs solid state can be an emotional issue. I understand why some people want to use spinning disks and more power to them. I have an XT with an old MFM drive and I love it. I enjoy pugging it in and powering it up once a year to make sure it still works and to keep the platters from seizing . But I don't do much with that system other than wax nostalgic. In systems that I'm doing stuff with, though? I prefer solid state rather than racking up more power-on cycles on an device that is daily inching closer to the MTBF rating.

So disk vs solid state is a choice that's hard to quantify.

I think the more interesting question is if you have decided on solid state, which solid state to choose? CF , DOM, SD2IDE, or Sata SSD.

DOMs are nice if you want to reduce cable clutter. The limitations with DOMs are that they are less portable and if want to go faster than UDMA2, you have to mod your device or get an male to male cross over cable.

SD2IDE can be nice if you are using something slower than a Socket 7 and you have plenty of SD cards on hand. The down side with the FC1307 (FC1309) based Sintechi units is that they don't support the SD UHS speeds or Ax features. So you are stuck with a 25MB/s throughput limit and there's no wear leveling. Also, the micro sd cards are pretty hard to fish out of a case if you drop them in there.

Sata SSD cards are pretty affordable in the 16GB and 32GB sizes right now. They are the clear performance winners. If you are using windows 2000 or newer or your system supports sata, I'd recommend them without reservation and they usually support trim too. The down side is if you have an older system, you have to stack a couple adapters together to make inexpensive mSata or M2 sata devices work with 40pin pata.

But for Windows 98? I think CF devices hit the sweet spot can for price, performance, compatibility and portability in that eco system if you can find the right CF cards. After that, the only questions that remain are "Do I want to get a male or female CF adapter" and "Do I want to set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in Win98se"?

douglar wrote on 2021-05-18, 19:24:

But for Windows 98? I think CF devices hit the sweet spot can for price, performance, compatibility and portability in that eco system if you can find the right CF cards. After that, the only questions that remain are "Do I want to get a male or female CF adapter" and "Do I want to set ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in Win98se"?

Absolutely disagree. Win98 from a SD or CF card is horrible. Maybe it was just my card but from what i've seen it's really slow and just a bad idea. YMMV i guess.
And when you're on solid state you generally want to disable swap for good and instead stuff as much RAM in there as physically possible.
This applies to retro hardware as much as it does to SBCs like a Raspberry Pi; ie. put /var/log in RAM and make sure the card is write-accessed as little as possible.
Since, as you said, SSDs have wear levelling, while SD/CF cards do not. Gotta keep those cells alive for as long as possible.

CF cards don't wear level? Really? You sure about that?

has been discussed before, looks like:
CF, SD, SSD, etc for Win9x and WinXP

What I miss a bit on systems with CF cards is the sound of the moving of the actuator and stepper motor..

In the DOS days, I could recognize the current part of the boot process solely by ear.

In the Macintosh scene, there was a discussion about this, too.

Apparently, there's a site/shop that sells an add-on for Apple 2 floppy drive emulators.

It's based on an ordinary mechanical relay.
It makes the "click" sounds that mimic the floppy drive sound.

Cool idea, isn't it?

https://68kmla.org/forums/topic/30598-how-abo … ounds-emulator/

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/06/25/intr … ing-noisy-disk/

Jo22 wrote on 2021-05-19, 10:58:

In the DOS days, I could recognize the current part of the boot process solely by ear.

Can't say much about the mac scene... I have a few though... but I know with floppy drives on PC I can absolutely tell whether a disk is being read properly, whether it's the disk or the drive just by sound.
One thing I haven't tried is those floppy emulators. Tempting for sure, but floppy drives are so plentiful (I have at least 20-30 of both 5.25 & 3.5") and disks are so cheap it hasn't been an issue but I do get tired of some drives reading disks from different drives or disks randomy not reading.

IDE sounds were pretty neat in the MFM/RLL Days and some IDEs like those flat 5.25" quantum drives sounded pretty neat back in the day... but a modern IDE sound isn't something I miss much.

In MFM/RLL days, the IDE was really the thing to have especially with voice coil of good models.

Even back in the day, even that late MFM/RLL was limited in capacity and cost and most of these that is 20 to 60MB range were very built lightly and delicate and stepper especially the rack and pinion gear type fail early and often due to two screws holding the rack loosening because hard drive makers did not loctite the screws properly causes the rack to get out of alignment and data loss results. Best way was adjust the rack and recover the data then trash the hard drive. Seagate used flexible bands in many types and works well but the spindle axle especially in 5.25" models is made of soft steel and bent easily when impacted even the surfaces survived enough for reading back data. I had seen the whole thing including spindle wobble.

Cheers,