(yes, laptop IDE 44-pin drives with 44-to-40 pin adapter will work; alternatively you could try these http://www.ebay.com/itm/232104721911?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT They are SSDs in 44-pin laptop drive form factor)

Like it was suggested... Laptop drives. Or....

- CF cards.
- SD cards.
- Seagate harddrives modded with SeaTools.

Those "IDE SSDs" smell fishy to me.

I'd recommend either a CompactFlash adapter - they're cheap since CF is actually IDE underneath. The speed isn't the best, but random I/O is quick and it's silent. For faster systems, there exists mSATA adapters which will give you hella performance.

I personally dislike the practice of modding SD cards into old computers. It removes a decent part of the experience. If you want to retro game, you need to have a full retro experience including all the downsides and caveats, because that's how they were played, and that's part of the true experience.

I understand the issue with the noise though, and I find WD Caviar drives from 1996-1997 are fairly quiet compared to some older systems. They aren't like modern drives, but they only get a bit noisy when used heavily.

Of course you can throw and SD card and/or CF solution in. There are millions of videos, posts, guides, and products letting you do exactly that for literally any computer that can support and form of storage. I just think when you don't wait for your floppies to load, when you don't wait for your slow drives, you just might as well use DOSBox because your getting rid of the reasons why many people don't use DOSBox. It's the statement
the harder you work and the more you endure, the better the end product is, and real drives are definitely a part of that, along with real hardware.

I mean if you want REALLY silent and REALLY fast, try to get a 10/100 ethernet controller with a network booter. You can then use your own personal hardware and have it even faster than standard IDE/EIDE. Just make sure your device has a decent chipset with the least amount of overhead between the ISA/VLB/PCI slot and the network.

As an alternative, you could try a newer IDE 3.5" drive (2003 or newer, say) with FDB bearings. Often these also support AAM, so you could adjust the seek noise as well. For particular models I would suggest Samsung SP0411N or SP0802N; Seagate ATA IV family; Hitachi 7K80 or 7K160 family. All of these (except the ATA IV >40GB) are single-platter designs.

Once again, let be bring DOMs (Disk-On-Module) to the discussion.

Experience doesn't mean much when hard drives drop like flies. Modern solid state media will get out of your way and let you focus on what you really wanted: a machine to run the things you remember... and removing bottlenecks. Likewise, I actively try to avoid touching floppy drives.

Netbooting for something that isn't just for setup or embedded is just plain silly.

@konc: Could you phrase that better? If you're talking about older embedded solid state media, the quality is good, but they're quite rare if I remember.

Ampera, I understand what you mean.
At some point upgrading makes no sense anymore, since you end up with something that is similar to an emulation.

For example, many C64 users mod/replace their good old (well, old at least) 1541 floppy drives with SD cards.
I think this takes away some of the look and feel of the whole matter. Personally, I rather wouldn't want that.

But I can understand why people do it. It's the same with the Gotek emulators.
Real floppies are hard to get nowadays and people seek for replacements.
Just think of old industrial equipment, that's still in use (are there any such C64 based systems left ?)

CF cards are more authentic, though, since they do natively support IDE and were available since the 90's.
And if they are installed internally, they don't ruin anything. The original drive can even stay in place.

So there's nothing wrong in using them in older machines. If you are going to be more old school,
there are even PCMCIA memory cards and DOCs (disc on chip) around, which you can try.

SSD and RAM drives aren't new, by the way. Real RAM drives were in use since at least the 1980's.
I have also seen an article of a floppy based SSD, which consisted of a battery and many RAM chips.
It connected to the floppy controller and had about 2MB of memory. 😀

calvin wrote:

@konc: Could you phrase that better? If you're talking about older embedded solid state media, the quality is good, but they're quite rare if I remember.

Yes, I'm talking about those solid state drives. They were meant to be used as "hard disk" drives so you're right about the quality etc (plus you don't have to mess with... questionable adapters to put it lightly). They're more common/cheap that you may imagine if you don't have any recent experience with them. ebay renders quite a few results, I won't link to anything specific unless you want me to. I've been using them in parallel with CFs (taking advantage of the fact that you can just plug the CF into a modern PC and copy files) and real-life experience is what drives me to mention them in every relevant thread 🤣 )

I jumped on the laptop drive bandwagon kinda early and got me a batch of 20GB drives, very fast for a laptop drive (probably because they were very recent make for a 20GB sized drive).

Very hard to hear these. Dunno about their availability, I was kinda lucky when I got them and I didn't buy them only for peanuts (but well worth it! 😁)

Hunt down a nice NOS Conner CFA-540A. The spindle on new ones is not too loud at all and it has a wonderful loud, clacky actuator.

Not all old harddrives are created equally noisy though. I selected a relatively non-noisy 1GB harddrive for my 486 years back. But the best way to find out if a drive whines too much for one's taste or not, is to simply give the drive a spin.

Some harddrives are so bad, one I tested made me want to put a pile of sandbags on top of it 😵
It actually got me to try out some custom suspension for the drive, but alas most of the sound was due to its bearings 😢

I also tried some minor custom case sonical isolation (using sheets of cardboard) and it did improve the nuisance of the whining for a bit, along with putting the system a bit further away from me (which is kinda a crappy solution).

Getting silent parts makes all the difference. I did notice harddrives starting to get a lot more silent at around the 20GB era, when fluid bearings started getting used a lot. Iirc WD U-series 5 was kinda loud and a WD U-series X was much more silent (please don't quite me on the model numbers, it's all from memory), both were 20GB and of around the same age but one drive turned out to be much more silent than the other.

I think the reasonably modern harddrives are a vast improvement when it comes to idle noise.

I recommend the IBM Travelstar notebook drives with fluid bearings: 15/30GN and later. They're pretty much silent.

Alternatively, I run one of these in my 486 Thinkpad in a CF adaptor, they're silent too 😎