TheMobRules wrote on 2021-09-09, 17:25:

How old were you when you did that? I'm not saying you're lying, but our memories from 20 years ago can become fuzzy as time goe […]
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Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-09, 16:28:

Yes, I really did. It was a 4GB drive, which became 8GB, I used it on a 300mhz celeron, and used it to store limewire content. But he was extremely slow

How old were you when you did that? I'm not saying you're lying, but our memories from 20 years ago can become fuzzy as time goes by.

As mentioned above, there is NO PHYSICAL WAY you can just duplicate the capacity of a hard drive like that unless it was a mislabeled part that was accidentally sold as a cheaper, lower capacity model. Or where someone previously set the jumpers to limit the capacity to avoid BIOS compatibility and you then set them back to the original capacity.

Yes, there were some ways to slightly increase the available space on older drives by playing around with the density (like someone said above, by low-level formatting an MFM drive as RLL), but that came at the cost of reliability, not speed, and the increase was nowhere near that dramatic. Also it wasn't possible to do it in all cases, the drive had to be RLL certified to have 100% certainty. A similar thing could be done with floppies, like Microsoft's DMF disks that stored 1.6MB of data on 1.44MB disks, but those are also just formatting hacks.

What you're talking about here is on the level of "downloading more RAM" in the sense that there is no physical support in the media to store those additional gigabytes.

EDIT: I guess the manufacturer may have disabled some of the heads due to factory errors on some of the platters and sold it as a lower capacity model, and you found a way to enable those back... but I don't know if any HDD manufacturers ever did that, and re-enabling those heads would at least require tinkering with the firmware.

It was in 2003, I think I was 11 years old, if I remember correctly it was an HD Quantum Fireball, or Maxtor, one of those that has a rubber cover around it. At that time I didn't have money to buy a computer, so I managed to assemble one with parts found in a junkyard, it was a PCchips X-cell motherboard, which had socket 370 and slot 1, but socket 370 didn't work anymore, even though I changed it. the place jumper. I had a lot of small sized hard drives (because bigger hard drives were expensive), I remember sometimes having to unplug the cdrom to use a fourth hard drive, as I loved downloading pirated games via p2p.

The socket on those only worked for PPGA celeron, not FCPGA PIII or coppermine celeron, but those would work in a slotket or SECC version.

This makes me wonder if there was a whole batch of drives that were labeled incorrectly at the factory.

It does make sense that if a drive was configured for a lower capacity that it would be faster overall because it would only be using the inner part of the platters.
This was a common practice as far as partitioning on HDDs to increase performance.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-09, 18:38:

This makes me wonder if there was a whole batch of drives that were labeled incorrectly at the factory.

I'm going to take the stance they used generic top cover labeling for drive series. I have examples of this from different manufacturers.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-09, 18:38:

It does make sense that if a drive was configured for a lower capacity that it would be faster overall because it would only be using the inner part of the platters.
This was a common practice as far as partitioning on HDDs to increase performance.

They could take a base build of hard drive, and then configure it for a specific market, for a price, but they would slap a smaller label somewhere with the exact model number, and it would be locked from the factory to that purpose. Because imagine the worry it would cause for marketing if the drive could be that easily changed. Although I have my doubts this was a thing for the reason of performance. You'd get faster speeds by faster RPM, higher bus rates, or better circuit design. If you really want to optimize the drive for data placement, there are tools/filesystems/partitioning for this stuff, so no reason to cripple access to the entire drive.

*Yes I know there are reasons for the drive jumpering for BIOS/OS limitations, but this is a different topic.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2021-09-09, 19:00:

I'm going to take the stance they used generic top cover labeling for drive series. I have examples of this from different manuf […]
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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-09, 18:38:

This makes me wonder if there was a whole batch of drives that were labeled incorrectly at the factory.

I'm going to take the stance they used generic top cover labeling for drive series. I have examples of this from different manufacturers.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-09, 18:38:

It does make sense that if a drive was configured for a lower capacity that it would be faster overall because it would only be using the inner part of the platters.
This was a common practice as far as partitioning on HDDs to increase performance.

They could take a base build of hard drive, and then configure it for a specific market, for a price, but they would slap a smaller label somewhere with the exact model number, and it would be locked from the factory to that purpose. Because imagine the worry it would cause for marketing if the drive could be that easily changed. Although I have my doubts this was a thing for the reason of performance. You'd get faster speeds by faster RPM, higher bus rates, or better circuit design. If you really want to optimize the drive for data placement, there are tools/filesystems/partitioning for this stuff, so no reason to cripple access to the entire drive.

*Yes I know there are reasons for the drive jumpering for BIOS/OS limitations, but this is a different topic.

Yeah.. maybe somebody packaged them incorrectly or they got mixed up somewhere between assembly and shipping.

Or it could be that the original seller just didn't know it was a larger capacity drive.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-09, 19:08:

Yeah.. maybe somebody packaged them incorrectly or they got mixed up somewhere between assembly and shipping.

Or it could be that the original seller just didn't know it was a larger capacity drive.

An error in assembly/packaging is possible. I think all the drives that came in that way from the store actually smaller got returned, and the ones that came actually bigger were probably kept, which might be why we have this question. The buyers got lucky, and no reason to complain...

Troll thread is a troll.

Boohyaka wrote on 2021-09-08, 17:19:

I believe you are mistaken. It's only they had a single label, and a single manual, for the whole series of hard-drives and capacities, and offered the C/H/S settings on the label for convenience.
No offense but what you say makes no sense from both marketing and technical point of views.

Trebly so, so correct.