$5 total? Wonder if that even covered shipping.

Is that thing IDE or SCSI?

Well, it was more around $15 once shipping was covered. Unfortunately, it was sold as "As Is"... looks like that's finally caught up with me. Never had anything before that I couldn't repair or didn't work right out of the box. 😒

SCSI Interface, it's a Micropolis 2217 - I believe 1.7GB or somewhere around there. I'm going to stick the logic board in a reflow oven eventually just as one last hurrah to see if I can't get it to work; if all else fails, it can be an interesting subject in a teardown video. 😀 I'm letting it run with the head-control cable detached just to see if it improves when warmed up to operating temperature... I know a lot of these old hard drives were actually temperature sensitive, which led to some interesting results.

I use CF cards and never looked back.

Buying an second hand hard drive is always a risk!.. You just need to decide for you self if the drive you wanting is worth the money.

2 months ago, someone listed locally about 30 hard disk drives. All IDE, "untested" and pretty old.
I bought the whole lot for 20 euros. It turned out pretty good! About 22-25 were working and passing the basic test, and about 18 were 100% healthy.
Capacities? 40MB-20GB, most about 1-3,2GB. Now I have hard disks for XT-Pentium systems for the rest of my life! :p

On old systems, I prefer to hear the loading sounds, to have exactly the old feeling... Even on late win98 games, loading times are not that high anyway! 😉

Yep, and I was willing to risk it on having this drive in working order; looks like this is payback for having received an 'undested' yet mint-condition NIB 486 motherboard for $20. Oh well. I'm the kind of guy that would gladly dump $1000 into a few palettes of old scrap systems thrown out by some company just to pick out a few nice units and gut the rest for anything of any functional value.

I know what you mean about having a pile of hardware happily humming along beside you. Nobody can deny how awesome it is to take an early Quantum Fireball and listen to the terrifying BRRRRRR that comes out of it when doing a random read/write benchmark... short lived as those things were, they were certainly impressive when they still ran. I'm also the kind of guy who has no problem sitting infront of an HP DL380 2U server re-purposed as a desktop, sounding like it's about to take off as six 15k SCSI320-SCA HDDs all start spinning up in series. If you ever have the chance to grab a ProLiant DL380 G4 for under $100 total, I'll be the first person to tell you that all 65-pounds (yep, that was the shipping weight) are completely worth the money.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I use CF cards and never looked back.

Using IDE to CF adapters, I guess? How's that going? Any compatibility / performance / durability issues?

maximus wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I use CF cards and never looked back.

Using IDE to CF adapters, I guess? How's that going? Any compatibility / performance / durability issues?

Best thing since slices bread 😁

I've been thinking of getting some CF cards, too. Seems like that's the way to go now. I'm a bit worried about durability of these things however... But on the other hand it can't be much worse than some old mechanical drive of unknown origins.

Also would a PCI IDE controller with UDMA6 speed up anything when using these cards?

I have also played some time ago with an CF card as well.. What i can tell> Compatibility is ok.. but not every IDE controller takes those CFcard, alltough they are UDMA..
Performances is really great.. Runs just very fast on boot up and loading time but what to keep me is its durability. I think it just last less longer then you just a regulator harddisk.. Mostly what fails on a harddisk is:

1. The controller board can go dead after a long time period.
2. The motor or bearings will be come to an end.
3. maybe the megnets from the heads will be just wear..

I dont think a harddisk would die on other parts.. And an CF card does have memory cells that can wear out like ssd do.. So over a long time period i only can recommend to go for an good brand/ type of harddisk with a very big MTBF time..

The badest thing on CF cards are, just missing that old vintage harddisk sounds.. Cant live without them.. They are just the part of the whole vintage experience.

Robin4 wrote:

The badest thing on CF cards are, just missing that old vintage harddisk sounds.. Cant live without them.. They are just the part of the whole vintage experience.

I was looking to get rid of that actually 🤣

I use 2GB CF cards on my 386 gear. Both are auto detected by the BIOS. When partitioning and formatting you end up with a ~ 500MB drive.

The controller I use is GoldStar Prime 2. I have others from UMC (this one has an issue with not detecting changing of floppies) and a ton of Winbond controllers, and not a single one works. So my favourite is the GoldStar Prime 2, I also have all the jumper settings so can disable resources I don't need like LPT1 and COM2.

On my time-machine (Super Socket 7 machine, which is my 386 replacement with PS/2 mouse) I can either use a 32GB CF card or a notebook HDD through a PCI SATA controller. Both solutions work fine. Currently I went back to using CF cards because prices for 32GB have become reasonable and 32GB is as large as you can go without breaking things in MS-DOS 7.1.

There are also micro drives, but they seem unreliable. Out of 5 cheapies ordered only 2 worked 😀

jwt27 wrote:

... would a PCI IDE controller with UDMA6 speed up anything when using these cards?

Everything will be much snappier, flash just creams spinners in access time.

400x CF vs ATA-100 spinner, both @ UDMA-33 on 440BX board:

Even though the spinner is a bit faster in sequential, overall the 'seat of the pants' is that the HDD just crawls in comparison, as the CF is 8 times faster in 4K read 😎 .

And while we're at it, behold how 'hypersonically' 🤣 goes a ramdisk on a 440BX with PC-133 SDRAM @ 150MHz :

I am not to big of a CF fan, due to compatibility issues, bad sectors or non accesible corrupted CF cards broken due to excessive writing maybe.
I trust the old spinner much more, and like the heads crawling sounds, only thing that could be annoying would be the spinning hiss.
As for acces times, a verrrry old drive with high acces times would be annoying on a older pc's like we still use but newer ones would be ok to use.

I envy those people to still use retro hdd's , they can feel the rumble and the distinctive sounds of those, i love it. thumbs up for those.
People using oldskool hardware give me a ......., but when they would use ssd's or CF in combination for storage or FDD emulators for a small performance increase on those machines...then they make my eyes roll... cant help it. really disappointing

HAha I don't use CF cards and FDD emulators for performance, but because they are more reliable and I can trust them. I don't trust floppies. I purchased four floppy drives a while ago and brand new disks and got error after error. All the disks I carefully created would throw errors. Really annoying and I have better things to do 😀

Now everything fits on one USB. I have boot disks for all DOS and Windows versions, benchmarks, Ontrack DDO, some games, utilities, Creative Sound Blaster disks...

I'm working on another video project showing how to create a DDO partition to break the 500MB barrier on 386 computers. Having full 2GB just makes things that little bit easier. Best of all you can still insert the drive into a CF card reader and it still works 😁

I feel like I'm laying the groundwork for when vintage hardware becomes so unreliable and/or expensive that the alternatives I recommend aren't a choice any-more. I also find mixing new and old very interesting and a challenge. Getting an authentic computer isn't hard, just very expensive.

I still use floppies, no problems, some get bad but most dont.
Maybe you got floppy drives with different calibrated heads, this would give you some hard times i believe it.
but for mass storage i prefer some quantum great balls of fire on the ide wiring, the seeking rattling noises are cosy in my oppinion.
A super silent drive makes me think the pc hangs itself when loading up some data, i need the feedback of noise 😀 to comfort me.

But to be on topic, TheAdmiralty i think you killed it maybe while turning on the drive and it was still wet somehow somewhere and creeping currents could have killed your hdd controller.

You should have dried it and heat it for some time before using when you saw the package was exposed to moist and rain drops.

The rattling I can live with but not if it slows things down. Disk cache helps there. Most annoying thing about harddrives is the constant high-pitched noise, and for that reason I've set my drives to stop spinning after 5 minutes of inactivity. But having to wait for it to spin up again in the middle of a fast-paced game is not that great either.

If you have a PC/XT with a big noisy MFM drive, then yes, that's certainly part of the experience. The harddrive is probably faster than the rest of the machine anyway 🤣
In a "relatively modern" Pentium 2+ system I find slow harddrives just annoying.

I really hate the sound the old hard drives make, noisy buggers! All of my retro PCs use old hard drives ranging from 100MB to 1.6GB but my 286 is too noisy for comfort. The PSU alone sounds almost as bad as Thermaltake Volcano 7 at maximum RPM.

I'm so sorry if this detracts from my retrosomeness but I just refuse to suffer the squawk and screech of ancient spinners. We had to endure them back in the time, but not anymore. Can't withstand any noisy comp in general, even with modern HDDs I need to silence them as much as possible.

Besides it's just that flash drives simply run circles around spinners 😈 :

Cheap Corsair F40 SSD in the same Pentium III system than the benchmarks above - 33 frigging times faster @ 4K than the HDD.

Half-Saint wrote:

... The PSU alone sounds almost as bad as Thermaltake Volcano 7 at maximum RPM.

Cheap old tired fan crying for replacement. Kick it away and get a couple modern low-rpm (900~1200) 80mm fans, front and rear. Don't forget to cut off the rear grill. The end result is a noiseless PSU.