I'm in the in-between camp. Get it right and add a large Compact flash.

In the day I had or still have:
Ibm model 30: 20MB (plus CF on xt-ide coexisting)
Nameless 286-12: 20MB
386-25: 80MB
486-66: 200MB
486-100: 400MB (still 504 limit!)
Pentium 120: 640MB (breaking 504 limit!)
K6-2 266: 3GB
K6-2 400: 5GB
Pentium 2-400: 6GB
K6-3+ 450@550: 6GB + 30GB
Pentium 3-800: 8GB
Pentium 4-1,7: 40GB
Amd 2800: 80GB
Amd 6000: 200GB
And there stuff gets way too new for Vogons imo...

I try to get my rigs some year correct primary hard drive or at most a year ahead. Next to that I'll add a CF adapter. I only use industrial CF for maximum reliability and make sure it's bootable.
286-486: CF 64 - 512MB
Pentium - Pentium 2: 256MB - 8GB
Pentium 3 and up: just what I've got lying around from 512MB and up.

Besides that I've got an 8GB CF with install files for Windows 98SE and common apps/games, a 128MB one for DOS 5.02 and a 512MB one for DOS 6.22. and a bootable DOS 6 one with troubleshooting/benchmarking stuff.

I also wanted to use CF everywhere. It helps a lot while I test the device, rebooting it all the time, running tests and so on. But that sound and feeling of moving device, rotating motors of FDD and HDD... It brought me that additional nostalgic feeling. And I tried SCSI, that's also an additional experience.

I'm currently working on 386 build as it's the most complete for now. I wanted to use CF there but in two of AT cases I've bought recently there were two real drives: 131 and 600MB ones. They are seems working. I'm going to test it a few more times but... I think I'll keep them 😀

dionb wrote on 2018-12-11, 00:52:

I'd say you're being optimistic there. Just looking at my own experience - in 1988 we had a pretty high-end 386-16 with a 60MB HDD. Friends with 286s and 20-40MB drives were jealous! In 1995 my Pentium 60 came with a 540MB HDD. Nothing special this time, but not small either. 4GB drives didn't become common until late 1997 or so, i.e. until the transition to P2. No P2 consumer-grade P2 would have been shipped with a 20GB drive either, that's deep P3 territory.

Good source for HDDs from the early 1980s to the early 2000s:
http://redhill.net.au/d/i.php

Back in the day, had 386DX 25 machine with 80MB, most people was going with 40MB on their 286 or top of line 386. I find this still too small as I filled up the 80MB with several games which are from 1.44MB floppies. That's around 1991 or so.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-09-04, 17:33:

Back in the day, had 386DX 25 machine with 80MB, most people was going with 40MB on their 286 or top of line 386. I find this still too small as I filled up the 80MB with several games which are from 1.44MB floppies. That's around 1991 or so.

Cheers,

So I see several aspects here.

1. If you want to be period correct while building the typical machine of that time you use the same amount of space or even some devices.

2. If you try to create a super build of that time. Like, there wasn't CPUs better than 386, they were not implemented yet, but at least you could buy that amount of memory or buy that amount of hard drives to get a system with 8 SCSI drives 500 MB each, for example, even if it costed a fortune.

3. To get anything you need to feel comfortable - any space, any speed. You need to try a task or an app filling all your RAM if you put something like 32MB in 386 for example, but you definitely find what to install on your hard drive even if it's huge as for that period.

Was reviewing lots of ads of different periods to get understanding of average builds. It seems like space always has been a problem until something like year 2002-2003, when hard drives became cheap enough.

I remember myself struggling with 800 mb hard drive on 486DX4-100 in 1997 (the notebook one, quite strange build but I was understanding nothing in PC builds back then). I remember my friend struggling with 52Mb drive on his 486DX2-66 approx. at that time, he had to reinstall every game he wanted to play or his system. That's why Stacker/DriveSpace/DoubleSpace were so popular.

On one hand, seems like drives were really expensive, so only few could allow enough space. On ther other hand, seems like people did not need that much space because software was even more expensive. OS, one or two small games, several programs for work - that's it. Even after years of the wildest piracy (in Ukraine), with numerous CDs like 'the best software bundle', 1000 and 1 games for DOS I can try that many software only now, when it's abandoned.

eton975 wrote on 2022-09-04, 15:35:

I'm in 'the largest the machine will support' camp myself. There are plenty of cheap used 20GB drives (smaller than the 32GB limit, will usually be recognisable as 8.4GB on Award BIOS at least) on eBay.

It can get a little more complicated than that.

1) If your BIOS is older than October 1994, you will likely encounter the 528MB original CHS limit and you need to install a drive overlay or an option rom to go past that.
2) Some BIOS from the 1992-1994 period have LBA implementations that are not fully compatible with later LBA implementations. These cases can be a pain. Often the computer won't boot when LBA capable storage is attached unless you add an option rom that does LBA28 correctly. http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2087
3) If your motherboard BIOS is newer than July 1994, you have a pretty good chance at using just about any IDE drive as an 8.4GB in Final ECHS mode, just like you say. It's not a 100% though. There's plenty of exceptions.https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Storage# … age_Limitations

• 2015 MB limit - INT 13h limit - Some BIOS before May 1996 allow drives up to 2015 MB by updating INT 13h to allow Cylinder values up to 4095. Head limit remained at 16, Sectors/Track at 63.
• 3277 MB limit - Phoenix BIOS 4.03 and 4.04 - The BIOS config screen locks if a drive is configured with a capacity over 3277 MB.
• 4.2 GB limit - ECHS limit (Extended CHS) - Some BIOS allow a 'Large' mode in the BIOS that produces an alternate geometry by doubling the number of heads and halving the number of cylinders shown to DOS until cylinders <= 1024. The limit for this method for drives that report 16 heads is 4032 MB (C=1024, H = 128, S = 63).
• 7.9 GB limit - Revised ECHS limit. Other BIOS from this period have a 'Large' mode in the BIOS that presents an alternate geometry using multiples of 15 heads, up to 240 heads. This method stops working at 7560 MB (C=1024, H=240, S=63)

There are also some CPU limits to keep in mind. I have mounted a 256GB drive on a 486 system using the final release of OnTrack disk manager, but it wasn't exactly pleasant to use. Took a long time to run a DIR command. Maybe I could tweak out the buffers in the config sys to make it more responsive, but I'd recommend keeping the storage capacity reasonable so that your CPU can hand the size of file system in a reasonable amount of time:
486 <= 16GB
386 <= 2GB
286 <= 528MB
8088 <= 256MB

Baoran wrote on 2018-12-11, 01:15:

dionb wrote:

I'd say you're being optimistic there. Just looking at my own experience - in 1988 we had a pretty high-end 386-16 with a 60MB HDD. Friends with 286s and 20-40MB drives were jealous! In 1995 my Pentium 60 came with a 540MB HDD. Nothing special this time, but not small either. 4GB drives didn't become common until late 1997 or so, i.e. until the transition to P2. No P2 consumer-grade P2 would have been shipped with a 20GB drive either, that's deep P3 territory.

Good source for HDDs from the early 1980s to the early 2000s:
http://redhill.net.au/d/i.php

I got 40Mb hard drive with my 286 and upgraded it to 120Mb when I upgraded my 286 to 386. I bought a 4.2Gb quantum bigfoot CY with my P1. I skipped 486 completely back then so I am not expert on that.

Same here. I had an 80 MB AT-Bus HDD by Conner in my 286.
But it was configured as a 40 MB model, because CMOS Setup Utility didn't have Type 47 support (custom values)..

That being said, this was in the early 90s.
My 286 was being equipped with 386/486 era parts.
Because that's what was available at the time.
Some may not find this period-correct, despite the fact that the setup existed in said time period (a paradox). 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, if you guys are into old, 286 era OSes, like PC-DOS 3.30 from 1987 (introduced AT support)..
Please just do take orientation by the supported capacity of the OSes.

DOS 3.30 supported 32 MB per partition, for example.
So if you don't want to use multiple partitions (DOS/DATA/GAMES/..), a small HDD suffices.

Less known OSes like Compaq DOS 3.31 or PC-MOS/386 did support greater partitions. About 256 or 512 MB or something along these lines.

Then there were filecards aka hardcards for ISA slot.
They were in the 20 to 80 MB range, I believe.

Edit: In the professional fields, free HDD space was always getting low.
That's were traditional thinking ends.
In some fields, even a 386 of the late 80s was being equipped with ~250MB SCSI drives or a couple of small drives.
It simply was needed to manage lots of data.
Think of a Novell Netware Server or a CAD/CAM or DTP workstation.

Edit: Capacity fixed.

Edit: I need to double check..
But it seems that the Seagate ST41600N was an 1,3GB SCSI HDD from 1991.
Source:
https://computer-retro.de/Festplatten.html
Pictures
So 500 MB to ~800 MB models may have existed in 1989? 🤷‍♂️

waterbeesje wrote on 2022-09-04, 17:00:

I'm in the in-between camp. Get it right and add a large Compact flash.

In the day I had or still have:
Ibm model 30: 20MB (plus CF on xt-ide coexisting)

Correct. My XT had a 20 MB MFM drive installed.
I liked the sound, but the capacity was insufficient.

At first, I tried to keep the drive by using Double Space compression. Which worked very well.

But even with drive compression, it wasn't enough.
40 MB and less aren't enough. Not enough to do anything meaningful.

Even back in my 286 days, 40 MB were hardly enough. I had to install/remove applications over time.

The reason is simple, development tools like Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic, and various C compilers go consume tens of megabytes easily.

If you add an installation of Windows or Geoworks Ensemble, the HDD is full very soon.

So as much as I'd like to agree, I can't. 20 MB isn't enough, except for playing Alley Cat and Monkey Island. 🙁

If you're an experimenter or artist (Deluxe Paint, Neo Paint etc), 80 MB is bare minimum.

Alternatively, a network drive is an option. Then, a 20 MB internal HDD is okay.
Edit: Or like in your solution, an extra CF drive.

Edit: I've forget some important detail here: disk utilities.
If you're remembering the 80s, you likely had a copy of PC-Tools installed.
However, versions before version 7.x did have issues with large hard disks.

I encountered the issue myself when I had been using Compress v6 on a big HDD running MS-DOS 6.22!
But the issue wasn't MS-DOS, really. On my 286-12, I had MS-DOS 6.20 running and Compress v6 ran fine (part of PC-Tools Deluxe).
That's interesting, because that 40 MB partition was exceeding FAT16 / the 32MB limit. I had used FAT16B, already.

So the issues aren't exactly FAT16 or FAT16B (Big FAT), but are somehow related to drive geometry or BIOS or IDE specs.
Maybe some register values were off or too large, not sure. 🤷‍♂️

So if you're into old Norton Diskette Editor, PC-Tools R4 or other dinosaurs, a small 20 MB HDD and MS-DOS 2.11, PC-DOS 3.30 or DR DOS might be a consideration.

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-05, 07:29:

Was reviewing lots of ads of different periods to get understanding of average builds. It seems like space always has been a problem until something like year 2002-2003, when hard drives became cheap enough.

I remember myself struggling with 800 mb hard drive on 486DX4-100 in 1997 (the notebook one, quite strange build but I was understanding nothing in PC builds back then). I remember my friend struggling with 52Mb drive on his 486DX2-66 approx. at that time, he had to reinstall every game he wanted to play or his system. That's why Stacker/DriveSpace/DoubleSpace were so popular.

On one hand, seems like drives were really expensive, so only few could allow enough space. On ther other hand, seems like people did not need that much space because software was even more expensive. OS, one or two small games, several programs for work - that's it. Even after years of the wildest piracy (in Ukraine), with numerous CDs like 'the best software bundle', 1000 and 1 games for DOS I can try that many software only now, when it's abandoned.

I think space remained a problem until a bit later in the 2000s. If you look at the hard drives I had:
1995 - 486 - 420 megs (which seemed huge compared to a 2x800K floppy Mac... but was filled up quickly)
1998 - K6 - 4 gigs
2000 - PIII - 20 gigs
late 2001 - P4 - 60 gigs boot drive, later added an 80 gig data drive I think it was
late 2001 laptop - PIII - 20 gigs
late 2004 - stupid Deleron MythTV project - 250 gigs
2005 - Pentium M laptop - my goodness, I don't remember the size of that drive, maybe 60 gigs
2006 - C2D - 320 gig boot drive, 250 gig document drive
2009 - C2Q - 1TB boot drive, replaced in 2011 or so with 160GB SSD
2011 - Sandy Bridge laptop - 750GB, later replaced with 180GB SSD
2017 - i7 Kaby Lake - 500GB NVME SSD

(One thing I learned after the K6 liked to eat Windows installs was the benefit of partitioning so you wouldn't need to back up your data to reformat/reinstall Windows. And I later switched to just doing separate drives rather than partitions. Then stopped doing that when Windows 7/10/etc basically didn't corrupt themselves anymore.)

Every 5 years or so, you had about 5X more space as on the previous drives.

Meanwhile, what I think you need to look at is how software was distributed and how that didn't increase at anywhere near the same rate:
- up until the mid-1990s, you were looking at 1.2 or 1.4 meg floppies, so something big like Office 4.2 Standard was 20 floppies.
- then you have a switch to CDs, which can do up to 650 megs (700 meg CDs came later). Originally the software that got copied to your hard drive might only have been 50-100 megs, then you had other things, e.g. clip art, that just stayed on the CD. You could even install some software to run directly from the CD; let's just say WordPerfect 7 running off a 2X CD-ROM is not pretty, but if you don't have the hard drive space, you don't have the hard drive space. Also, some games (e.g. CivII) used multisession discs and had most of the CD used for audio CD-format audio.
- DVDs at 4.7 gigs only started being used for software distribution in, oh, the mid-2000s. Vista was first version of Windows on DVD. I'd have to dig through my old stash of games but I can't recall any games being distributed on DVD until 2004-5 or so. I don't think 8.5 gig dual-layer DVDs were ever widely used for software distribution on Windows, though Apple certainly shipped a number of releases of OS X on them.

Compare those sizes with the hard drives. In 1995, a single CD could store 200 megs more than my 420 meg HD. In 2002, my 60 gig HDD could store over 90 CDs' worth of data or over 12 4.7 gig DVDs. In 2006, my 320 gig HDD was now up to nearly 500 CDs or 70 DVDs. And most software developers tend to favour making software that is 1 CD or 1 DVD - there were some exceptions, both for games and productivity software (Corel loved to ship CorelDRAW with multiple CDs full of clip art, fonts, etc) - but I think 1 CD/1 DVD was something they aimed for, especially in an era before everything was expected to be copied to the hard drive.

And that's the other thing - a lot of software gave you a lot of options for how much to copy to the hard drive and how much to leave only on the CD, so you could balance your hard drive usage with your desire for performance and features. I actually installed something on my vintage G4 Mac a few months ago, can't remember what it was, and it had a "copy everything (700MB)" option with a snarky comment about how insane that would have been. A few years later, copying all 700 megs to the hard drive wasn't insane. And indeed, by the time you see NoCD patches for games, that became the norm - everything was copied to the hard drive, the games only asked for the CD for a piracy check. You see this with Windows and drivers too - on Windows 95, you had to insert the Windows CD when installing new devices; by, oh, I don't know, XP or so, they copied the entire driver library to the hard drive without even asking for your opinion.

Then in the late 2000s, with the rise of home Internet speeds, electronic distribution through Steam and the like took over, and that eventually leads to a massive increase in the size of games in particular to the levels we see today.

You can avoid all of the IDE headaches by going SCSI. You waste an expansion slot for the SCSI card though.

Errius wrote on 2023-07-06, 17:21:

You can avoid all of the IDE headaches by going SCSI. You waste an expansion slot for the SCSI card though.

While are some benefits to going with SCSI, it also has its fair share of random headaches that come in addition to cost, IRQ & slot issues.

You can have device id and termination issues on your cable. You can have booting, device driver and BIOS issues with your OS. There's about 10 different standards: SCSI, Fast SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra 2 Wide SCSI etc etc. Finding reliable media in 2023 that works with your card's SCSI implementation can be a challenge.

I'm not saying don't do SCSI if you want to do SCSI, but it's kind of the opposite of cheap & easy retro storage. It's got its share of issues, they just are not as well documented.

Errius wrote on 2023-07-06, 17:21:

You can avoid all of the IDE headaches by going SCSI. You waste an expansion slot for the SCSI card though.

You'll have all the mentioned problems (like size compatibility issues) additionally to new SCSI problems.

It's still possible to find new 40-80 GB drive or use a CF card and XT-IDE solves most of drive size related issues even by cost of partial drive usage.

VivienM wrote on 2023-07-06, 02:34:

1995 - 486 - 420 megs (which seemed huge compared to a 2x800K floppy Mac... but was filled up quickly)

I remember the exact configuration of my first PC as it was quite slow even for the time I bought it (1997), so I had to spend a lot of time tweaking and investigating. And then, when system administration became my job, I was spending more time with hardware in my companies, so all the next configurations are not so detailed. But since my third one that I bough in 2003 I never had problems with free hard drive space.

And as for CDs - agree, they were slow and read only at the beginning, but stored more data than your harddrive - that was priceless. Big hard drives killed them and now cloud storage is killing big hard drives (at least on consumer level).

And as for CDs - agree, they were slow and read only at the beginning, but stored more data than your harddrive - that was priceless. Big hard drives killed them and now cloud storage is killing big hard drives (at least on consumer level).

A cloud is just someone else's PC.
And it's slow. Very slow. A local USB C connection has 20 GBit/s. A typical internet connection has how much?
25 MBit/s, 100 MBit/s or 400 MBit/s to 1 GBit/s?

But that's just maximum download speed during idle times. Upload speed is only a fraction of it.
A network drive in a LAN can do up to 10 GBit/s (both ways) using consumer level hardware. Still higher than any cloud service, I assume. 🤷‍♂️

Edit: If being translated to MB/s, any common internet connection speed looks like a joke.
Because the relation between improvement in storage capacity and improvement in transfer speed is way off.

At such low speeds, it's very difficult to actually fill these capacities in time.
Or in other words, transfer speeds somewhat lack behind the storage capacity.

Let's just look how quick throughput inside a chipset has become, by comparison.

10 MBit/s, the lower end of the line, was being possible by coaxial ethernet of the 1980s.
The 80s! It took nearly 15 to 20 years until internet connections catched up. That's shame ful.

10 MBit/s.. 1,25 Megabyte per second
25 MBit/s.. 3, 1 Megabytes per second
100 MBit/s.. 12,5 Megabytes per second
200 MBit/s.. 25 Megabytes per second
400 MBits/s.. 50 Megabytes per second
1 GBit/s.. 125 Megabytes per second
10 GBit/s.. 1,25 Gigabyte per second

Edit: And that's just raw speeds. Protocol overhead and latency etc will cause actual speeds to be lower, even.
So a 10MBit/s connection had merely 2/3 the speed perhaps under real world conditions (800 KBytes per second).

And most provider didn't provide full speed, anyway. It was just the theoretical maximum.
So in practice, it was merely a half or quarter of it.

So a 10MBit/s connection provided the user with 250 Kilobytes per second download, and 50 Kilobytes per second upload ? 😢

Edited. Edited.

Edit: Or let me put it this way.
When DSL was being advertised in the early 2000s, providers bragged with connection speeds of "up to" 250 KBit/s, 500 KBit/s and 750 KBit/s. Wow. 😒

I thought of my father's old PC's from the 80s with their MFM hard disk drives and found this to be absolutely lousy, if not comical.
They had transfer speeds that were higher than that. Jesus were things backwards.

Where was fiber? Where is fiber? It should be standard since year 2000 (fiber to the building). No flying cars, okay. But fibre had been neglected since the 1970s.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-07-06, 21:02:

When DSL was being advertised in the early 2000s, providers bragged with connection speeds of "up to" 250 KBit/s, 500 KBit/s and […]
Show full quote

When DSL was being advertised in the early 2000s, providers bragged with connection speeds of "up to" 250 KBit/s, 500 KBit/s and 750 KBit/s. Wow. 😒

I thought of my father's old PC's from the 80s with their MFM hard disk drives and found this to be absolutely lousy, if not comical.
They had transfer speeds that were higher than that. Jesus were things backwards.

Where was fiber? Where is fiber? It should be standard since year 2000 (fiber to the building). No flying cars, okay. But fibre had been neglected since the 1970s.

Five things:
1) 250-750 kilobit/sec DSL, for $40-50/month, was excellent at the time. Keep in mind that home users were using 56K modems, and many people's phone lines weren't able to get anywhere near 56K, before then.

2) Most Ethernet NICs were 10 megabit/sec in the late 1990s. People went from 10 to 10/100 to gigabit in the course of... 6-8 years. And, it's worth noting, few people had home networks - if you had two computers at home, you likely moved data between them on floppies...

3) WAN technology was... pricy. Sure, if you were a very serious player, you could get, say, a DS3 (45 megabit/sec), but that cost very serious money in the late 1990s. Many people dreamed of an Internet T1, and that ran $3000-5000/month (USD or CAD). For 1.5 megabit/sec symmetric.

4) There's an old saying from the 1970s or maybe earlier "do not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barrelling down the highway." You can update it to "do not underestimate the bandwidth of a SUV full of 2.5" external hard drives" in the 2020s and the principle still holds. A Chevy Tahoe SUV, with the seats folded down, has 3480L of cargo space. A 5TB external hard drive is 0.15L - not sure if that includes the packaging or not. If you were not restricted by weight, you can easily put over 20,000 hard drives in the Chevy Tahoe, for a total data volume of 100PB. Problem is, those hard drives at 210g each weigh 4200kg. And the payload of a Tahoe is 750kg; substract 100kg for a non-athletic driver, and you're limited to 3100 hard drives, or 15.5PB.
Assume the Tahoe moves 100km/h, so that means you can move 15.5PB of data 100km in 1 hour, so if you wanted to move your data, say, 500 km away, that means you've moved 3PB/hour, or 0.8 terabytes/sec, or 6+ terabits/sec. (Ignoring, of course, the time it took you to fill up the hard drives at the starting point and get the data out of the hard drives at the receiving end) If you replace your Tahoe with something that has greater payload, you can increase your bandwidth quite substantially - we could try the same exercise with a 3500 cargo van, say - but even with the Tahoe's weight restrictions, you are moving 8X more data than the fastest Ethernet standard (800 gigabits/sec). If you want to have some fun, calculate the bandwidth of a FedEx MD-11 full of hard drives flying around. While SUVs move at the same speed or often slower that station wagons did 50 years ago, the density of storage media has grown probably at least as much as WAN speeds, so this general principle still holds. And I don't want to redo the math, but there are 4TB external SSDs on the market weighing 110gs, so I suspect "do not underestimate the bandwidth of a SUV full of external SSDs" will remain true for at least a few more decades.

5) In North America, at least, fiber to the premises for residential/small business fell victim to the general deregulatory trend in telecom in the mid-1990s and continuing to these days. A deregulated company would rather invest money in DSL/cable modems and get more usable life out of their existing copper infrastructure rather than incur the construction costs of stringing fiber to individual customer premises. Here (Canada), there has been a lot of fiber building in the past decade, but it's mostly because cable has been able to scale to speeds that DSL, even FTTN DSL, can't match, so the phone companies have been forced into fiber. And yes, they started that build 10-15 years late...