VOGONS


First post, by iwcham1979

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Hello guys, I bought this board with Intel DX4 overdrive and 32GB ram, all socketed 😎 and also bought a nice AT case with PSU. I don’t have a HDD and I am interested if a 10Gb hdd will work with this board? I found a narely used, 28days total working time Seagate ST310014ACE with 100% health. What do you think? Is this any good?
The board is SA486P AIO Rev:1.0
Any help appreciated. I have very limited knowledge when it comes to retro hw. Cheerz!

Reply 1 of 8, by Doornkaat

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Welcome to the forum!😃
The board may have one of several HDD size limits in BIOS. Since it's a late 486 board I don't assume it has the 528MB barrier but especially the 8.4GB barrier may apply.
If it does then the issue can often be overcome with dynamic drive overlay software or XTIDE BIOS.
Some HDDs also have a jumper to limit their capacity below a barrier but the one you posted about doesn't appear to have that feature.

Reply 2 of 8, by Horun

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The manual shows pics of Phoenix 486 bios 1.00 dated 1993, that would make it a 512MB HD limit, that limit was not broken until 1996 when they included int13 extensions iirc.
Is why Drive Pro, EZ-Drive, etc were created 😀

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 8, by dormcat

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iwcham1979 wrote on 2023-04-28, 14:53:

Hello guys, I bought this board with Intel DX4 overdrive and 32GB ram, all socketed 😎 and also bought a nice AT case with PSU. I don’t have a HDD and I am interested if a 10Gb hdd will work with this board? I found a narely used, 28days total working time Seagate ST310014ACE with 100% health. What do you think? Is this any good?
The board is SA486P AIO Rev:1.0
Any help appreciated. I have very limited knowledge when it comes to retro hw. Cheerz!

Welcome. Firstly, well, you increased the size of your RAM by a thousand folds. 😅 Those should be four sticks of 8MB 72-pins SIMM.

Secondly, a 10GB HDD is way too large for a 486/OD system; it became available around 1999 when Pentium 2 was the mainstream while Pentium 3 was just around the corner. Even if its BIOS could handle HDD larger than 528MB/504MiB (very unlikely), you still need an OS that supports FAT32 (e.g. Windows 98) to partition the HDD, something the system would struggle with difficulties to run. IMHO a CompactFlash memory card with 128-512MB would be your best option.

Reply 4 of 8, by maxtherabbit

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I think the 10GB seagate would be a wonderful choice - you can overcome any BIOS limitations by using the XTIDE Universal BIOS

https://xtideuniversalbios.org/

Reply 5 of 8, by chinny22

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When you say found do you mean you already own it? If yes then I'd say it's perfect!

I own three 486's and typically go with 6-8GB which is still natively supported and gives enough space to install dos/windows, games, apps, have a "recovery partition" where I keep the OS and driver install files and still have a bit of space left over.
That last 486 has the 512MB limit and even using multiple CF cards I found it too limiting so went with Dynamic Drive Overlay software and 10GB is still in the same ballpark as 6/8GB.

Reply 6 of 8, by st31276a

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Although the Seagate is an excellent find, I would reserve it for a P2/Mendocino build and stick in a Conner CFS425A or something similar. Capacity should not be an issue on a 486 as the typical programs one would use are small.

Reply 7 of 8, by Disruptor

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iwcham1979 wrote on 2023-04-28, 14:53:

Hello guys, I bought this board with Intel DX4 overdrive and 32GB ram, all socketed 😎 and also bought a nice AT case with PSU. I don’t have a HDD and I am interested if a 10Gb hdd will work with this board? I found a narely used, 28days total working time Seagate ST310014ACE with 100% health. What do you think? Is this any good?
The board is SA486P AIO Rev:1.0
Any help appreciated. I have very limited knowledge when it comes to retro hw. Cheerz!

Well, to a 486 there are basically 3 important borders for HDDs: 504 MB, 2 GB and 8 GB
It is unlikely that your 486 board will support a 10 Gb HDD.
In the worst case the board will hang at HDD detection.
However, some HDDs have a jumper to limit HDD size in hardware and there do exist tools that allow you to limit HDD size in software.
Your particular ST310014ACE supports the size limit in software.

Reply 8 of 8, by iwcham1979

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Guys, now I am a bit confused… So will this board and cpu support these HDDs out of the box? One is 1.3gb, the other is 1.7Gb.

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