Reply 40 of 45, by Jo22
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- l33t++
Hi. I've recommended both DOMs and CF cards so far. DOC-2000/DiskOnChip chips, too.
DOMs are ideal, because they're usually SLC and meant exactly for this purpose.
They look like a hard disk, have removable media bit as "fixed" by default.
But they're very small capacity wise.
DOCs can be installed on network cards (?) or custom built ISA cards. They're ancient SSD tech.
They have firmware, also, to map their filesystem into the host system.
That firmware takes up memory in the UMA, like an Option-ROM. XT and AT firmwares exist, a re-flashing might be necessarily.
Also, these chips are slow. int13h interface only.
CFs have a long history and a native parallel IDE interface.
The are available in the 512MB to 8GB range which is nice for DOS systems.
504 MB is the maximum via CHS, ~7GB or ~8GB via E-CHS.
About 8GB is the maximum that Windows 3.1x fast-disk drivers do physically use (no partition thing).
Any larger, and address-wraparounds issues etc may appear.
I'm no fan of SDHC/SDXC cards.
a) because I personally consider them as cheap consumer/mainstream stuff
b) because of the low-quality converters which I had bad experience with (got hot, had shorts etc).
HDDs are nice, provided that they still function. By 2024, though, it's hard to recommend a 30 to 40 years old mechanical piece.
It's like with an electrolyte capacitor or fan in an old power supply.
It may be fine, yes, but actual condition can't be known in before. 🤷♂️
Btw, old MFM/RLL may have a bigger chance to be repaired than more modern drives that came after them.
The external stepper motors can be retrofitted with new grease etc.
There's not much electronics on the hard disk itself, after all. It's more a mechanical piece with some electric amplifiers.
Edit: I forgot. MFM/RLL drives usually didn't have auto-parking feature. An MFM/RLL (ST-506 etc) must be parked via DOS utility.
Ideally every time then the PCs gets switched off, but mandatorily if a PCs gets physically moved. Otherwise a head-crash is likely to be happen.
Unfortunately, most users don't know that. Not these days. So any power on test by an eBay seller may impose a danger that the drive won't arrive unharmed.
Edit: SSDs in general have the advantage over HDDs that they have a very fast response time (access time).
That means that a missing hard disk cache on the software side, such as Smart Drive, isn't that of a loss. Memory can be saved by not using it.
However, cheap flash media (SD..) may not be made with random read/write access in mind.
They were designed for digital cameras, camcorders and mp3 players. Which use linear access or sequential access. Either one big file (video recording), or many little ones - but one after another (playing mp3s).
That's why they stutter under Windows 9x. Windows 9x causes a lot of hard disk activity, even during idling.
I remember that from the 90s, when my dad ha 386 running Win95 RTM. The HDD lights were always blinking..
Windows 3.x, DOS or Amiga/Arari ST are different here. They're read-only, more or less. They don't have any background activity.
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