VOGONS


Reply 20 of 35, by SteveC

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I think you need to downgrade your drive a bit for around 1995. These are the three oldest drives I still have that work:

Western Digital Caviar 1170 170MB dated September 1994

The attachment caviar 1170.PNG is no longer available

Quantum Fireball SE SCSI 2.1GB with dates on chips from late 1997

The attachment quantum 2.1 both.png is no longer available

And a loud Fujitsu 4GB (same as yours?) which is dated July 1999

The attachment fujitsu 4gb.PNG is no longer available

Cheers,
Steve

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Reply 21 of 35, by krivulak

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SteveC wrote:

Western Digital Caviar 1170 170MB dated September 1994

Oh wow, didn't know this drive existed! Of course I am missing it from the collection and of course I really, really want it 😁

Reply 22 of 35, by brostenen

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torindkflt wrote:
dionb wrote:

Don't expect SCSI to help in the noise department though... these were high-performance parts with even less attention to acoustics than IDE drives of the era.

In all honesty, I don't recall Macs from this time period being overly noisy, and they used SCSI hard drives until well into the PPC era IIRC.

I have an old 40mb Apple branded SCSI in my 286. It is running at somewere between 3200 and 3800 rpm. I can never remember what the exact speed is. It is pretty quiet though. And, Ohhh... It is a Conner. 😁

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Reply 23 of 35, by Baoran

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I think I had 160Mb and 320Mb drives back then.

Reply 24 of 35, by kixs

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Around 500MB will be just fine. My friend had 486DX2-66 and ~520MB HDD in 1994. I suppose in 1995 you would have 640 or 800MB. But not more then that. Even this would be pretty expensive HDD.

If I remember correctly my brother bought 1GB Quantum Fireball in 1995 for Am486DX4-120. He was playing with Linux and needed a bigger drive.

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Reply 25 of 35, by Intel486dx33

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I had a 120mb Conner drive back in the day with my first PC build.

Generic case
Generic Taiwan ISA motherboard
Intel 486 DX 33mhz. CPU ( $100 )
120mb conner - $120
4mb ram - $80
Sound blaster compatible sound card - $30
ISA I/O controller
Sony 2x CDROM ( $100 )
floppy drive
14.4 modem ( generic )
Cheap speakers.
14" SVGA Color Monitor

And it only Cost me $2,500
I don't know why it costs so much, but it did.
IBM computers back then where about $3,500

These Conner drive have a unique sound. Very retro.
Like a dot-matrix printer.

Reply 26 of 35, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Before '95 all my systems had been SCSI-based and under 1GB, until I changed to this initial trio of WD Caviar drives (these are original purchases by me at the time)

The attachment WD Caviar x 3.jpg is no longer available

They were all so much quieter than the SCSI units they replaced then, and even today they're still pretty quiet although the 1GB can be a bit 'sticky' after prolonged storage and the 1.6GB has a very slowly growing bad sector table so needs careful partitioning but still, not bad for 25 year old tech.

Reply 27 of 35, by SW-SSG

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^Neat. I've got an AC31000 here too, with the same stiction problem; only after some shaking (while powered off) can I get it to spin up and initialize properly. Last time I checked it (November 2016) it still had no bad sectors.

Reply 28 of 35, by anetanel

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SteveC wrote:

And a loud Fujitsu 4GB (same as yours?) which is dated July 1999

fujitsu 4gb.PNG

Not exactly the same model, but I guess close enough:

The attachment 2018-08-16 18.38.46.jpg is no longer available

Reply 29 of 35, by SW-SSG

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^MPC3032AT is a 3.2GB device, not 4GB. Same family (MPC) and associated chassis/bearings/etc as SteveC's 4.3GB MPC3043AT, though.

Reply 30 of 35, by anetanel

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I got the IBM DALA-3540 today and installed it in place of the Fujitsu drive.
I learned the following:

1. It is not quieter :\ The drive that I got has an even louder spin noise 🙁

2. It is really picky about the IDE cable location. I had it installed as master with a IDE2CF adapter as slave, the HDD was attached to the end of the cable, and the CF to the middle connector and both were detected. But it gave me all kind of trouble. For example, it wouldn't get detected if the CF card was not present. Or it would not boot from the HDD even though I installed DOS and could see all the files on it as C drive when booting from floppy. Actually in the middle of DOS installation it suddenly could not detect the drive. Upon boot the HDD wasn't detected in the BIOS until I shut down completely.
Finally I changed the positions on the cable - the HDD as master in the middle and the CF as slave at the edge, and now it would detect both fine, and boot from the HDD.

So, I'm still in the market for a quite, era appropriate drive.

Reply 31 of 35, by shamino

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My 486DX2-66 started out with a pair of Conners: a 240MB and 40MB. I don't remember when we got the 240MB, but both were inherited from an older 386SX.
Both of the Conners were quiet. I had to listen close to hear subtle clicks. I wished they were louder.
There's a strong correlation between a drive's seek noise and it's seek time, and Conners (at least those models) were on the slow end of the spectrum. I didn't hear bearing whine from them either, but after sitting around for ~20 years, maybe they'd be noisy if I plugged them in now.

The 40MB always had some funny issues getting along with newer hardware. To my memory it never worked with an EIDE controller.
Prior to that, it refused to work as a slave under the 240MB drive. Years later I saw an article on the Seagate web site (after they bought Conner) which showed an alternate, undocumented jumper config that it needed. This fixed the issue, but a bit too late to matter anymore.
Unfortunately I did not save that info anywhere (I wasn't organized about that kind of thing back then), and I seriously doubt there is any surviving documentation for a 40MB Conner hard drive on Seagate's web site today. I doubt Seagate even remembers that they own their product line.

In ~1996, rocking the 486DX2-66, I bought the first hard drive I bought with my own money. It was a 1.6GB Western Digital AC31600. I didn't know it wasn't period correct. 😀
To be fair, the 1.6GB did later land in a Cyrix 6x86.
See the thing is, I've never built a complete PC with all new parts bought on the same date. Do people actually do that?

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:
WD Caviar x 3.jpg

They were all so much quieter than the SCSI units they replaced then, and even today they're still pretty quiet although the 1GB can be a bit 'sticky' after prolonged storage and the 1.6GB has a very slowly growing bad sector table so needs careful partitioning but still, not bad for 25 year old tech.

That Caviar 31600 is the same drive I bought. I think it was $350... amazing how much money I was willing to spend on PC hardware while making $4.35/hr.
It was the loudest (seek noise) IDE/ATA hard drive I've ever had. But I thought it sounded awesome. It was loudest and fastest when I loaded some kind of acceleration driver for our Acculogic EIDE VLB controller. I don't know exactly what that driver did, but it made a real difference. The hard drive was definitely faster and it had moments of sounding like a dialup modem transfer when it was loading some games.

Unfortunately the drive didn't last long. Mine had the same issue as yours - a slowly growing range of bad sectors. But mine started doing it within a year of purchase. It was the most expensive, most initially impressive, and most ultimately disappointing hard drive I ever bought. My first experience with hard drive failure.

Reply 32 of 35, by Koltoroc

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you are likely not going to find a quiet era appropriate drive for a number of reasons.

1: the bearings are old and the lubrication has aged significantly increasing the noise. There is nothing you can do about this AFAIK. Also pretty much all disks of that age have ball bearings which are inherently noisier than modern bearing types.
2: The drives were not quiet to begin with. Noise was not a concern for drive manufacturers at that time IIRC Hard drives that put emphasis on noise reduction weren't a thing untill the late 90s early 2000s. Which also coincided with the wide adoption of more modern bearing types

Basically you are in the market for something that likely doesn't exist (anymore). Even if you would get a NOS HDD chances are the bearings (or rather the lubricants) would have aged to the point where they would be much noisier than intended.

Reply 33 of 35, by HanJammer

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For 1995 the most appropriate HDD will be 420, 540 or 850MB harddrive. Like Western Digital Caviar, Conner or Seagate Medalist. 850MB were most popular in 95-96 for 486s and Pentiums, 97 seeing the advent of 1,2 and 1,6 GB drives in cheaper computers.

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Reply 34 of 35, by BinaryDemon

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I was gonna guess 500mb, I remember buying a 340mb shortly before upgrading my SX-33 to a DX4-100, but I was on a budget and definitely wasn't an early adopter of the DX4-100.

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Reply 35 of 35, by shamino

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I recently bought a 2.1GB SCSI drive with an early 1995 manufacturing date. I guess it was very expensive at the time though, and doesn't represent what normal people were buying for a desktop PC.

Crossing my fingers that it works. If it does it will be awesome for a P-60 build I've been planning. I don't have my 486 anymore but the early Pentium fits the same mood. It's the system I wanted, but not the one I had. 😀