chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-24, 03:16:

I never really noticed it here on vogons?
Sure people will recommend them or the SD or SATA options which is ok as if someone is asking about hard drives then maybe they don't know about the alternatives.

I also appreciate other suggestions like this even if it's not exactly what I asked for. Getting into DOS gaming can be really intimidating for a newbie and, even if you've done research before asking a question, you might not be aware of other options.

If I'm going to ask a question here and anticipate answers that I don't want, I'll just mention that in my post. Most people here will read your entire post if it's not too long and also looks like you've done your research. I can't say that I've had any problems with that approach.

CF cards are fun for quick plug and play on pci and isa drop in cards. Kinda like a bootable hard card when working on units.

But for the final systems as I make them I prefer scsi and clicky noises for isa systems. But pci systems get m.2 sata ssds! :p

I appreciate SCSI 10k+. If you want to go HDD sound, might as well go full hardcore and have decent access times. But they are pain to setup, due to cabling and external controllers. Old SATA WD Raptors are also nice though and easier to handle.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-01-24, 04:34:

I appreciate SCSI 10k+. If you want to go HDD sound, might as well go full hardcore and have decent access times. But they are pain to setup, due to cabling and external controllers. Old SATA WD Raptors are also nice though and easier to handle.

I second this ..I have three 15k SAS drives and they were a pain to get setup, but the pay off is three stupidly fast spinning rust HDDs in Raid that are about as nice as Spinning Rust can get.

I also have 4 Raptors in Raid and that by comparison was easy, too easy really.

Haha, my POD build has a 15k 140? Gb 80 pin scsi drive fun stuff!

One system, a Pentium 200 MMX, has a 2GB CF card. And a Quantum Bigfoot 2.1GB, a real monstrosity. I like it.

Another rig; HP Netraid LH3 + 4x 36GB 15k rpm SCSI goodness.

PD2JK wrote on 2024-01-24, 06:32:

One system, a Pentium 200 MMX, has a 2GB CF card. And a Quantum Bigfoot 2.1GB, a real monstrosity. I like it.

Another rig; HP Netraid LH3 + 4x 36GB 15k rpm SCSI goodness.

heh a working Bigfoot...now that is a rarity!

Sphere478 wrote on 2024-01-24, 05:29:

Haha, my POD build has a 15k 140? Gb 80 pin scsi drive fun stuff!

Thats a No from me, nope never you can keep your 80 pin SCSI.

Honestly, I never used a CF drive and only have one that was meant for a laptop, but the controller won't work in my model.

Old spinning disks are fine for old systems with slow SCSI, MFM, or IDE drives. I prefer IDE drives in old laptops since they just work and are reliable and fast enough.

My main machines use NVME and SATA SSD's because modern OS just use too many small files for a spinning disk to keep up. But for the older stuff I just mess with SATA HDs are just fine and are DIRT cheap these days so I stock up. You can get tested laptop SATA drives in the 300-500GB range for a couple bucks each shipped if you look around.

Somewhere down the road I will stock up on SSDs that are too small for modern OS's assuming they still work. I have 80MB laptop drives that still work fine, not sure modern drives will be working in 30 years.

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-01-24, 07:12:

Honestly, I never used a CF drive and only have one that was meant for a laptop, but the controller won't work in my model. […]
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Honestly, I never used a CF drive and only have one that was meant for a laptop, but the controller won't work in my model.

Old spinning disks are fine for old systems with slow SCSI, MFM, or IDE drives. I prefer IDE drives in old laptops since they just work and are reliable and fast enough.

My main machines use NVME and SATA SSD's because modern OS just use too many small files for a spinning disk to keep up. But for the older stuff I just mess with SATA HDs are just fine and are DIRT cheap these days so I stock up. You can get tested laptop SATA drives in the 300-500GB range for a couple bucks each shipped if you look around.

Somewhere down the road I will stock up on SSDs that are too small for modern OS's assuming they still work. I have 80MB laptop drives that still work fine, not sure modern drives will be working in 30 years.

Modern drives are not built for long term life unless you are willing to pay out the nose for it so I fully expect a ton of Spinning rust Ewaste shortly as data centers move to either SSDs or to newer bigger HDDs. 30Tb HDDs are available for long term storage but for Data centers im sure there are larger sizes, SSDs have already eclipsed that with 100+ TB SSDs being available but they are not safe for long term data storage and are well ...expensive.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-24, 03:16:

I never really noticed it here on vogons? Sure people will recommend them or the SD or SATA options which is ok as if someone is […]
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I never really noticed it here on vogons?
Sure people will recommend them or the SD or SATA options which is ok as if someone is asking about hard drives then maybe they don't know about the alternatives.

Personally for dos only PC's I like spinning rust for c:\ That way the PC sounds "Correct" when booting, CF card for the data, games, etc. The speed boost is nice.
Once PC's aren't limited to 8GB spinning rust is fine. I have spare drives and don't really need the speed boost of SSD's.

If I was having to go buy hard drives I may thing different but even then, have purchased number of SCSI and about 5? <8GB IDE drives and only had 1 DOA drive.

Nor had I TBH, but there's a definite strain towards/wrt 'period correct' and 'authenticity' of the system builds.... but it's going to end up like wine tasting ; you don't know what's in the bottle, until you open and taste the contents.

What I mean by that, is that eventually these old mechanical drives will all be dead =) Further, unless you open the case, you don't know what's inside... example: a mate has an old AT, the old drive in it is dead but still spins up. It's not connected data wise, just power... so when you turn the box on, you hear the drive spin up, stabilize, and the OS loads from CF card ...and to complete the illusion .. https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-b … retrocomputers/ .... and without opening the box, only a keen ear will notice the hard drive click isn't quite right =)

Seeing as one could already do it.... and I'm quickly reminded of combustion engine sound emulators for EVs.... I fully expect 'someone' to do the same thing wrt spinning rust, startup sound, droning spin motor and head seek noises...with park and spindown.. (one can do this already with something like an esp32)... and as long as you don't open the case, nobody knows... 🤣...

The full disclosure is, it's exactly why I hang onto good, known working spinning drives... because ppl want them, and pay good money for them ~ IRL I just use CF or pci M.2 (or SCSI2SD)...

"Not in my lifetime", he said assuredly ...I will not recover the many hundreds of dollars spent on 40MB hdrives that still work fine, not now... I'll pass these down to one of the grand children, with a note saying "These all work and one day will be worth good money ~ when they are, sell them".... a 20th century inheritance 😎

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-23, 20:33:

Well, any reason is a good reason to use or not use a CF card. It's great that we have options and nothing stops you from using […]
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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:37:

Personally, I think CF cards make sense if you: […]
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Personally, I think CF cards make sense if you:

a) are using DOS or early Win95 class hardware
b) want the ability to switch between multiple operating systems quickly and easily
c) prefer a quiet machine

At the same time, I do understand people who are nostalgic for the crunchy read/write sound of a real HDD. That stuff never bothered me, but I always disliked the high-pitched noise produced by spinning platters. This gets especially annoying if you are using several HDDs with 7500 RPM or higher. For that reason, I will happily use modern SSDs on anything more powerful than a Pentium MMX.

Well, any reason is a good reason to use or not use a CF card. It's great that we have options and nothing stops you from using both simultaneously. It's a personal thing. These old computers don't really serve much purpose other than 3 points: invoking feel, understanding computer history and giving hardware nerds something to nerd out about. 95% of the people on here just play games or benchmark anyway.. catastrophic failure is really not the end of the world and I believe hard drive failure rates are overstated, at least from my personal experience with hard drives that are kept in a normal environment.

What annoys me is that the second you mention mechanical hard drives anywhere today you'll immediately get a CF card slapped in your face as a response. It doesn't even matter how much you say that you specifically want to use a mechanical hard drive.

Now I absolutely don't mind that people tend not to like hard drives, keeps prices low for me who do want to use them 😉

keenerb wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:15:

I switched to IDE disk-on-modules for all my machines. Is that more or less annoying? 😁

Never even heard of this lols, that's cool. How have your experiences been with them?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:15:

Yeah I'm tired of hearing about them too, especially in the context of asking for help configuring them (geometry, partitioning, etc.)

People run into a ton of setup issues they wouldn't have using period appropriate storage

I do think CF cards have a better reputation than they deserve, even if they are useful, cheap and usually work. They can still present problems not found in original hardware, and they are by no means guaranteed to be reliable. CF cards don't have unlimited writes and were not designed to host operating systems.

DOMs are designed for "Braindead industrial systems" that are often lacking in BIOS enabled functionality, and thus are by design, able to handle several legacy modes of operation that CF->IDE adapters do not. This makes their compatibility a little better. They *ARE* intended to be drop-in replacements for spinning rust on "Impossible to replace" industrial equipment, that utilize vintage hardware internals. (CNC machines, et al.)

They also tend to be better in terms of the quality of the flash layout used (Closer to 512 byte sectors, like legacy disks, with a write buffer) and thus less prone to damage from aggressive writes.

They are however, more expensive. They DO tend to be physically smaller though.

Another, often overlooked option, is to abuse the shit out of modern software.

Take for instance, the memdisk module used by ISOLINUX / SYSLINUX. This is not, (and please, dont consider it such) an edorsement of Linux, but rather a point-out to a clever trick you can do with an alternative boot loader, which is what SYSLINUX is.

On a system with a huge amount of RAM installed, it is entirely possible to use a small EX2 file system to host syslinux and memdisk, along with a gzipped raw disk image for the "Hard drive". Memdisk is a ramdisk driver that installs PRE-OS load, that takes over memory query INT15h, and parts of disk IO routine INT13h. As far as DOS is concerned, it is booting from a normal drive once syslinux executes the boot sector. It reduces the amount of free RAM reported by INT15h, so that DOS memory managers do not clobber the memory allocated.

A relatively small DOM or CF-IDE can be used then, to host the image file and boot loader, and actual disk IO after boot is totally ephemeral from the ramdisk. Very very handy for those industrial machines, as it makes them MUCH harder to kill, since the actual boot media can be set read only, without any issues whatsoever, and any borked up corruption is fixable with a simple reboot.

The resulting system is lickety-split fast, at the expense of a somewhat protracted boot time (loading the whole disk into RAM on boot...)

Memdisk can be abused with tftp PXE boot roms as well, due to the small size of syslinux, (or rather, its custom-tailored fork, PXELINUX) for a completely HDD-FREE legacy system.

I apologize if this sounded like one of those Linux apostle posts; Again, this has nothing to do with actual Linux, just with a specific alternative family of bootloaders that have a useful feature that can be abused for starting DOS and other real-mode OSes, as an alternative to using CF-IDE, or other solutions in ways that destroy cards, or even altogether.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-01-24, 08:03:

I apologize if this sounded like one of those Linux apostle posts; Again, this has nothing to do with actual Linux, just with a specific alternative family of bootloaders that have a useful feature that can be abused for starting DOS and other real-mode OSes, as an alternative to using CF-IDE, or other solutions in ways that destroy cards, or even altogether.

No, this is insightful. "That crowd" of the linux community is for the most part just the arrogant and loud minority preaching that linux is unequivocally the only usable thing for anything and anyone.

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-24, 16:08:

wierd_w wrote on 2024-01-24, 08:03:

I apologize if this sounded like one of those Linux apostle posts; Again, this has nothing to do with actual Linux, just with a specific alternative family of bootloaders that have a useful feature that can be abused for starting DOS and other real-mode OSes, as an alternative to using CF-IDE, or other solutions in ways that destroy cards, or even altogether.

No, this is insightful. "That crowd" of the linux community is for the most part just the arrogant and loud minority preaching that linux is unequivocally the only usable thing for anything and anyone.

I once got banned from a forum for saying that linux is only free if your time is worthless.

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-24, 16:08:

No, this is insightful. "That crowd" of the linux community is for the most part just the arrogant and loud minority preaching that linux is unequivocally the only usable thing for anything and anyone.

Having used various flavors of Linux over the years, I've never understood fervent Linux evangelism.

For server or embedded stuff, sure Linux is absolutely useful especially if you have specific use cases for it. For desktop, I always come back to Windows. It's just more convenient and compatible.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-01-24, 16:33:

I once got banned from a forum for saying that linux is only free if your time is worthless.

🤣

SSD and CF are not the only options.
I do have some SD adapters. I never used them yet, but. SD are cheap, easy to find, and you can always have a dump to rewrite them just in case.

The write cycle limits is not a real issue. I mean we are not dealing with servers. We need them for some old PC that we use from time to time to play a game.
Probably someone with a camera will do more write cycle than us with a retro computer for the rest of our live. Especially on very old system with no swap OS.

The write limit is in any case very high. So even if someone do a very intensive use of the system the worst thing that can happen is to reinstall after some years of use.
And generally we do it anyway.

Also the performance is not a problem. In any case the bottleneck is in the adapter not in the media. And very old PC don't need high speed drives.

DOM are hard to find now. They cost a lot and have small storage space. And basically they are an adapter plus a solid state media in one package.
But they are nice, very compact.

SDs are usually go to option for 286-486 PCs, because they operate only in PIO modes, by default, and better options are kinda wasted on them.

I love using actual mechanical hard drives on my vintage computers myself, I feel like it really is part of what makes an old computer an old computer. Being dead silent would be so weird to me. Like someone else mentioned, I also feel the unreliable of old hard drives is massively overblown and I honestly find old CD-ROM drives to be far more unreliable than hard drives.

I own an NEC PC-9821 Cs2 and I use that with a Quantum Fireball 1GB HDD (though only 540mb is usable due to a BIOS limitation), and from what I've seen of other PC-98 users in the west, I don't think I've ever seen a single one of them actually using an old mechanical hard drive, literally all the ones I've seen use CF cards. Am I really the only one?

One more thing, I recall an RMC video where he went through multiple Amiga 500 external hard drives and they were all working if I recall but he didn't keep one of them with an original drive and replaced them all with CF because "they're gonna die soon" or something to that effect. Again like someone else mentioned, you're not gonna store critical data on it, so even if it does die sometime what's wrong with having fun with it while it's working?

Of course you can do whatever you want and makes you happy with your hardware, but I just wish more people would appreciate these old beasts.

thepirategamerboy12 wrote on 2024-01-25, 05:35:

One more thing, I recall an RMC video where he went through multiple Amiga 500 external hard drives and they were all working if I recall but he didn't keep one of them with an original drive and replaced them all with CF because "they're gonna die soon" or something to that effect. Again like someone else mentioned, you're not gonna store critical data on it, so even if it does die sometime what's wrong with having fun with it while it's working?

Yeah, I think that was one of the videos where I realized that it was a bit ridiculous. Especially RMC who features those old systems in some kind of museum, you would think he would at least attempt to preserve the units as close as they were originally, instead of just a shell with a card floating inside. It's strange, as if keeping the perfectly working original drive was not even a choice.

I find that for tinkering purposes an old hard drive is no different from an old motherboard, CPU or set of RAM modules.

I do not typically use (or currently own) any machine older than a P2 233MHz, in which I have a 128GB micro SDXC card on an FC1307 based adapter . This is fast enough ( on a PIIX4E ), reliable and easily swappable.

On anything newer P3 and P4), I use adapted (Marvell, JMicron or Sunplus chip) SATA SSDs . On those systems, I have occasionally used CF cards for quick tests, but since my CD card collection includes only relatively slow and small (2 to 16GB) CF cards left over from DSLR use, long term use is not enticing.

On the relatively modern systems that I own, and I would imagine most LBA capable machines, getting a CF card , SD card or adapted SATA drive will not be an issue if one stays within the known limits of the retro computer's known or tested capacity. Many older non LBA machines (or those with LBA bugs or capacity limits) can be outfitted with an XT-IDE BIOS in ROM or even load XT-IDE from floppy.

Of course, one can always use retro (period correct or not) IDE hard drives, if working ones can be found in one's area. Other than reliability and speed concerns, the noise of worn bearings can be quite grating (it is to me, though others either do not mind or enjoy that sound).

While I understand that using actual vintage storage is important or essential to some people, and it is their right, I would argue that for many people just getting into to hobby, starting with CF or SD adapted storage as a proof of concept might be a good primer/starting point. Others will certainly argue that using vintage storage to begin with (instead of CF, etc) avoids some hurdles/complexity/issues. There are many variables at play in this.

I use Linux practically exclusively for work and I use a mix of Linux and Windows at home for not retro use cases. IMHO, there are many situations, both retro and modern, where using Linux is quite practical, possibly more so than using Windows. Also IMHO, there are situations where using Windows is more practical. Windows Subsystem for Linux under Windows 10 is also quite useful at times, IMHO.

At the end of the day, operating systems preferences and hardware choices are not religious positions and, even if they were, they would not justify a holy war.