Hard drive options for Retro PCs

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[@XanCrews]

You have come a LONG way in the production value department in 3 years. Good shit Phil... Good shit.

[@clintonswart6670]

Gosh. Funny as it is, I've never used a SATA to IDE converter. This video has been SO HELPFUL. thank you.

[@xeruffurex]

I like the older videos you have, there like the origin story. Thanks for the giant data download over the years :)

[@IanRomanick]

After watching a bunch of your more recent video, this one was... kind of rough. :) You've come a long way in 3 years!

[@antraxbeta23]

I got lucky and found 2 new slealed quantum HDD's , they were given to me for free :D one is 20GB the other 40GB , they work fantastic , got to love the sound when they spin down when i turn off my pentium 3 machine :D

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice.

[@Cesar-ot1xk]

@@aretard7995 sealed

[@jopht1640]

Lucky you,dude 👌

[@raspberry1440kb]

@@aretard7995 New old stock.

[@brostenen]

Really cool video. Thanks. As old drives wear down, we need to go for new ones. How to get them going in old machines, is the trick.

[@rodhester2166]

great refresher..

[@tsxownz]

hi phil , you should make an update of this video

[@lightdark28]

I actually use a 300GB Ultra160 SCSI drive (Seagate Cheetah) in the Athlon 1400 machine, quite noisy as you said, but fast, and the high capacity means I can run full installs , making the loading blazing fast. the other 2 machines I have (P133 and a Core2duo based HP XW4400 workstation) use IDE drives of various kinds. I tend to go overboard with storage, but it pays off.

[@n86cc]

Thanks Phil.

[@Veg-Power]

very interesting vid to me, thanks! :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Glad you finding it useful.

[@brostenen]

Why did this video pop up in my suggestions list... Anyway.... Nice to see it again. These past few weeks, I have been researching info on old vintage IDE controllers for ISA/EISA/MCA/PCI, and have found that there is absolutely no reviews of these things, if I need a kind of video like those V3/G400/TNT2 comparison video's. Lots of gfx and soundcard videoes, yet no real Controller video on youtube. It's an overlooked segment of vintage computing, that people for some reason is not interrested in. Yet it is a vital component of any computer.

[@hblaub]

Oh very interesting! I watch it now because I've got an old computer just featuring an IDE. Used a SSD RAID controller in the past, but its driver support was buggy.

[@BelongsToJesus]

I have been real successful using "Promise Technology SATA 150TX4" SATA 150 controller. It works in the oldest system I have which is a Intel 440HX chipset and above. It has Win9x driver support and works great in DOS. Costs about $25 on Amazon new. Avoid the Fasttrack raid controller unless you want to raid only and get the serial ata only.

[@philscomputerlab]

+Bobby Gunn Thanks for the tip!

[@bacadd]

I tried several Silicon Image 3114 cards and could not get them to work... maybe driver mismatch. Purchased a Promise Technology SATA 150TX4" SATA 150 controller and worked right away with my ASUS - P3V4X. Thanks Bobby for the suggestion!

[@ryanstoddard1803]

Thanks Phil for these ideas, I have been worried about my Gateway Essential 450 and my IBM PC 300GL with the old ide pata hard drives and their eventual failure. I am going to upgrade with 120gb sata drives and use the ide to data adapter (not the card). Now my iMac G3 I am not so sure about.

[@adam6759]

Stating the obvious but you are a legend. Had a SATA VT6421A PCI with windows 98. Running no problem then changed from a SiS motherboard to a VIA ones with issues regarding transfer speed and lagging. Watched this video and comments about the chipset etc. Bit the bullet and got a SATA PCI silicon 3512 and the issues have gone away. Life saver!

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice! With VIA boards, and other chipsets, IDE is often what I end up using as it works well.

[@adam6759]

@@philscomputerlab couldn’t make it up. Just got an Intel slot 1 setup and having the same issues again as the VIA but this time with an Intel Chipset, the MS 6156 with the Intel® 82443BX chipset. Will have to try the Silicon one out later. I guess these VIA ones are just a bad choice period, although seems to be no issues with the SiS chipsets. Do you know how the Silicon ones work with SiS chipsets?

[@heroijapa]

I did't knew seatools and the limitation, thaks for the info! Finally i can grab a new hd for my old pc! I was thinking that flash and sd interfaces where the only solution since my bios only works with 32gb. Thanks!

[@incandescentwithrage]

Many years ago I had a good 'hack' use for the 4 port silicon image sata cards: Remove the BIOS chip and fit a plcc32 socket. Put the BIOS chip back in the socket and boot up. Once the card has initialized, the BIOS chip can be removed, and the flashing tools used to hot swap in and reflash pretty much any motherboard BIOS (or plcc32 flash chip) to recover from a bad flash etc

[@JaqiesGadgets]

You don't need a driver for a SCSI hard drive in DOS if the controller has a proper boot BIOS!

[@Bewefau]

Thanks for video. You made me want to make a windows 98SE gaming machine but man is it hard t ofind the right parts T.T it's so picky

[@moshehim1000]

Your accent cracks me up. "in terms of rotting speed"... lol.

[@johanandersson8689]

Very interesting video! I have finally ordered some retro parts and I'm thinking about storage. So far I've bought an ASUS P3B-F, an Intel Pentium II 400Mhz and two Kingston PC-133 256 MB sticks. My preferred method of storage is definitely the compact flash with a slot at the back. I REALLY like that they are compatible with the IDE standard and that there is no need for converters. I also like the idea of having different CF-cards for different projects. I've never (not even in the 1990s) been fond of hard drives. Somehow, I feel that mechanical parts have no place in a computer. Do you have any idea of the performance if i decide to go with a high end compact flash? Sandisk Ultra, Sandisk Extreme or something like that. My idea is having a card that is so fast that the IDE controller becomes the bottleneck.

[@philscomputerlab]

Johan Andersson You'll be very happy with a fast CF card.

[@reishojiang]

I am your super fan from Taiwan......

[@MDFGamingVideo]

I found a PCI SATA controller on Amazon that uses the Silicon Image SIL3114 chip: GODSHARK 4 Ports PCI SATA Raid Controller (1 of several clones using the same controller) It detects my new ADATA SU800 120GB SATA 3 SSD, and I can FDISK/Format them from the Windows 98 boot disk. (Going to use GPartED to align properly, just did a quick test) Comes with drivers for 98, ME, NT and 64bit Windows. Bonus info: Some Seagate 5.25" SATA spindle hard drives have a jumper to limit them to SATA 1 speeds. If you are OK using a hard drive, this also works with Windows 98 and some old on-board SATA controllers.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice! Yes there are a few controllers that work well with Windows 98 SE. I have used one from Promise with great success.

[@eguevaralopez]

been binge watching, this content really brings me back! what are your thoughts on running an ssd through a sata to pata adapter vs a sata pci controller? Im building a system with an or840 mobo and it has ultra ata66 ides, and 32/33 pcis. In theory the sata controller provides double the bandwidth (~133MBps due to pci limitations) of the ides, I'm just not sure its needed in such a system where the fastest incoming data would be from usb2. keep up the great content!

[@philscomputerlab]

My thoughts are that these old machines don't have the CPU power to take advantage of anything faster than 33. Unless you just want to copy files. You just got to compare how long it takes to boot a Pentium II vs a fast Pentium III. With faster machines you will see a benefit. Personally I prefer to go straight to a PCI SATA controller, or use boards that have it built-in (Athlon or Pentium 4)

[@eguevaralopez]

thanks for the reply! yeah, I just really wanted a dual slot 1 with rdram-fulfilling childhood dreams-so that limited my board choices. another question and I'll leave you alone, this is more a personal preference: what new tech do you feel is mandatory (because it makes your life easier, because it replaces failing equipment, or whatever reason) in every retro build? I'm really excited about this build! You'll probably see me posting at vogons when I start putting it together ;) once again, thanks for the reply and for the content!

[@philscomputerlab]

GOTEK Floppy and SD card. Hands down :D A must in every old machine.

[@metalschnulli]

@PhilsComputerLab can you help me please? do you recommend a CF IDE or SD IDE Adapter for a P3 1Ghz Win98 SE Laptop instead of a regular IDE Harddrive?

[@groenevinger3893]

Is it possible to use the silicon image 3114 under windows95 on socket 7? thx for sharing you're video's!

[@grassulo]

I was looking at getting a 50mb/sec 8 gigabyte CF card for my old Pentium 100 which I believe has an ATA33 controller, so the read and write speed of that CF card I'd think should far surpass what the interface can do at maximum. Just checked and the original HDD is only 16mb/sec so this card should be more than fast enough.

[@SodaGumX]

where do you buy the front hard drive bay?

[@JimLeonard]

Curious what your experience is with the XT-IDE line of homebrew adapters. If you think adding drives to retro PCs is tough, try adding modern drives to systems with only 8-bit slots... :-)

[@JaqiesGadgets]

+Jim Leonard they are almost always built by enthuisasts for enthusiasts. make sure to read all the literature available for them, and then if you are ok with the limitations, take the plunge!

[@kallelarsson2429]

How about ide ssd’s?

[@josepedrocarmo5885]

Nah, nah, actually a very interesting video! :)

[@user-wh2zb5cm1f]

I have a powerbook 540c (apple laptop) with scsi hdd, what can I possibly use to replace the drive in there? I'm very shocked it still works after 25 years but I know i'm playing with fire, needs to be cloned or at least replaced

[@smg4gaming-poppyfromdreamw136]

This is better than MY Mate Vince Computers vs. CONSOLES

[@RetroPCUser]

One drawback of running Windows 9x on a CF card is freeze-ups. And DOS games and sometimes the OS itself could freeze up as well. Right now, I'm cloning my CF card on a 200GB HDD expanding the File system to 7GB for more games and files. My retro PC is running MS-DOS 7.10 (fan made and Win98SE based) ad Windows 98SE.

[@philscomputerlab]

+WinVistaUser2 I must say I never encountered a freezing issue with CF cards.

[@RetroPCUser]

PhilsComputerLab Depending on the CF Card, such as SanDisk Ultra. Mine always froze up, and it was the CF card, not my GPUs or anything else like that.

[@philscomputerlab]

That's not good. When you say froze up, like locked the machine for good, or did it make a pause? I only ever saw this with micro drives, they are quite slow.

[@RetroPCUser]

PhilsComputerLab Locked up the machine for good that requires a hard power off and power on again, check the drives for errors, repeat until the drive gets replaced with a hard drive. I have a Seagate 40GB PATA HDD from 2002 that was pulled out of a Compaq Presario 6300, with the jumpers set to CS and 32GB limit (since my PC has a 32GB limit). Hasn't frozen up at all. In fact, it's faster than the CF card was (CF Card transfer rate is 66MB/s, while the Seagate drive is 100MB/s. I was going to use a Maxtor 200GB HDD (only 7.8GB due to limitations), unfortunately, the HDDs never seemed to like the FDISK program (verifies disk at 15% and repeats). Although, it gets 133MB/s.

[@8KilgoreTrout4]

If I throw a SCSI controller, whether PCI or ISA in my P-II/III machine for use with DVD drives that I can boot with?

[@squirlmy]

There are ISA SCSI drives, even 8-bit ones, and they don't need drivers if operating properly. I used Mac's in the mid-90s, and they all had SCSI, and I found it not only faster, but more reliable than IDE (or EIDE). You could also connect Macs on-the-go by FireWire, when you still needed slow PC-Link software to transfer a few files PC to PC. Apple had some justification in claiming superior performance back then. SCSI had been used for years in Sun workstations and servers, basically all the high-end workstations used it. IBM might have slowed the development of PC drives when they converted all IBM PCs to Micro Channel Architecture. It was a good standard with good specs, but when every clone-maker was sticking to EIDE, and supporting components that were cheaper and much more widely available... It was good to have Nubus and SCSI in Macs at that time. So very different than today.

[@designertjp-utube]

Hi! Towards your video end you discuss how to lower the gigabyte size of a 2T Hard Drive to run swell under Windows 98 at approx 128 Gigs. Are you using this huge Hard Drive, instead of a trusty old legacy 120 gig or less hard drive (that Windows 98 could & should handle), to enjoy maximum durability and less chance of crashing? I'm sure the 1T or 2T Hard Drives are built with much more modern components inside, but are they that good to actually think about buying them off Amazon and then allocating way less space to run on an older Legacy Computer?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea some drives can be configured to basically report a smaller capacity to the BIOS. Now modern drivers use SATA, so whatever your system, it has to be compatible with that. Seagate drives work well here, you use the SeaTools DOS utility. AFAIK Hitachi has something similar as well.

[@Bewefau]

How do you make windows 98 see the hard drive if your trying to isntallit with SATA hard drive and SATA DVD rom ? I dont know where to find drivers or anything.

[@PhilipPetev]

Hi, Phil! Nice review, but you should mention the "Flipping the removable bit" problem that many of the CF users may experience.

[@philscomputerlab]

No idea what you're talking about, I've never heard of this.

[@PhilipPetev]

Some CF (and not only CF) cards require this bit to be flipped, otherwise they are being seen as "Removable drive" and not as "Fixed drive". Not so big deal for DOS, but a must for Windows.

[@philscomputerlab]

Odd, never ran into this issue.

[@PhilipPetev]

I have. Tried one old 2GB SanDisk Ultra CF with the CF to IDE adaptor I have (one of those with PCI bracket that can be found on eBay). The BIOS sees it as a drive on the IDE bus, but the card appears as removable drive in Windows 98 SE. Haven't even tried to fix it, because it wasn't mine.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea never had that issue, and I worked with a LOT of different systems.

[@intel386DX]

the rard part is about XT and early ATs (8086 and 286) they can not use custom parameters for IDE drives :(

[@andrewrfpi]

Are there any options to replace esdi drives like scsi/sd card adapters? Thanks.

[@SevenDeMagnus]

What's the a good HD capacity for installing all the best MS-DOS games? Would 500MB is a good size? I'm using VirtualBox. Thanks.

[@CTFC-GERMANY]

you could have talk about the different sector-sizes on sata drives (512b vs 4k), since not all OS are compatible with the newer 4k standard natively (older systems like MS-DOS, Windows 98 and XP does not run well on newer 4k-sector storage without additional work! ). Otherwise very nice video!

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea good point. The Seagate drive has this mentioned somewhere in the datasheet, that 512 sector sizes have no performance impact. I do remember that detail, though not sure if I mentioned it in the video. I doubt the overhead would be high enough to really notice with these old machines?

[@CTFC-GERMANY]

some more indepth info about the whole thing: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/win7appqual/512-byte-emulation--512e--disk-compatibility-update

[@jonchapman6821]

I always thought the point of compact flash cards was that their write speeds were super fast 🤔 Edit: Oh I see...they’re really slow at writing small files, smaller than photos.

[@Tr3vor42532]

for earlier Socket 7 computers, like P166 or slower, ~1GB drives would be more period correct. for 386/486

[@WR3ND]

In the era I'm looking at for my 486 build, most decent IDE HDDs were around 500MB... LOL - I'm looking more for something SCSI-2 2GB. 80GB IDE drives seem too modern to me to bother with for now. Maybe in another 10 or 15 years or so. I have plenty in my basement already as it is now.

[@oblivionlord1242]

IDE drives are not modern at all and for yourself thinking they're. I am lost for words

[@WR3ND]

@@oblivionlord1242 That's because you apparently don't know what my post is about. Intel 486 CPUs are roughly 30 years old. DOS 6.22 (28 years old) has a partition limit of 2GB. 80GB IDE HDDs are essentially wasted in this scenario, i.e. too modern, but they might be useful for a Windows 98, 2000, or XP era build (Pentium through Pentium 4 era) - Windows 95 was transitional between FAT16 and FAT32. On the other hand you still see some modern era laptops running Windows 10 with as little as 64GB storage capacity and 4GB RAM soldered on the board, but I wouldn't recommend them. For comparison, my primary computer at this time (not particularly "retro" yet, but getting there) has a 4TB Samsung 860 Pro SATA3 SSD (OS and installs) and a 16TB WD Gold SATA3 HDD (media and backups) with an i7-3930K and 64GB RAM- Windows 7 NTFS. Hope that helps resolve your confusion.

[@hannonm]

I have a SCSI card and a SCSI CD Writer. it has the cradle type. you place the disc in the cradle, than insert it into the Drive.

[@philscomputerlab]

+Amy Marie Nice, haven't seen one of those in a while :)

[@KasuMistrz]

Does Compact Flash adapter will work with 8088/86 PC?

[@philscomputerlab]

If your PC uses IDE standard.

[@Thrakus]

When you did install older games in dos i remember this message with TakWars installing may cause lose of data on scsi hard dries I do not see how this can be true so i never did care about the message and went on. anything do toes message`s?

[@philscomputerlab]

+Michelle L I would ignore such a message as well.

[@billgates3699]

This music made me think you were about to introduce the tale of Milo & Otis. WTF

[@jonathanthompson4296]

Do you have to format the SATA drive before placing in system. I tried to install a 120gb ssd with an adapter but bios/system will not recognize. Ideas?

[@philscomputerlab]

If it doesn't get recognised, then it's not the right drive to use! Go with something else, like a SD card.

[@jonathanthompson4296]

@@philscomputerlab well for some reason my K7M Asus motherboard continues to not see any hard drives regardless of what I do. I get alot of ATAPI incompatible

[@lucaspam]

Phil, could you update this video? Something has changed on this meantime?

[@niels_m_h]

Things are mostly the same. Old hardware is still becoming harder to find, of course. One option he doesn't mention is that you can actually find new production PATA SSDs on EBay/AliExpress, you will also need a mini IDE to full size IDE adapter since they are 2.5" drives. You'll get good performance while being able to use any motherboard's onboard controller. I have one of KingSpec brand.

[@bitdevice]

Since CF card have a limited write cycles they tend to be really bad for operating systems that support virtual memory (a page file on disk). Phil, have you tried using Microdrives instead since they are real mechanical harddrives in a CF form factor?

[@philscomputerlab]

+Markus Buretorp Actually, yes I have! I found performance to be extremely low. They also generate pauses, when being accessed, so long that you notice it in DOS games. The game will simply pause for a moment while the disk is being accessed. In Doom for example you can see the disk access icon all the time LOL You're right, for Windows 98 I go with real hard drives rather than CF.

[@bitdevice]

+philscomputerlab Ah, good to know! I was really close to buying a Microdrive to test in my Amiga or PC.

[@philscomputerlab]

They might be a good fit for a 286 or 386. But on a 486 it's holding you back.

[@pentiummmx2294]

i used a 2gb seagate drive for the noise and clicks to complete the retro feel on my Pentium 1 DOS PC but it started acting up like getting bad sectors and not working right and later it completely failed like there were so many bad sectors that the format was so slow, it kept saying "Trying to recover allocation unit" in the formatting process. i just scrapped the drive and took the magnet out of it, i am using a 40gb drive in place of the 2gb drive, it's so quiet compared to the 2gb drive. Those old drives don't age well and they just simply die like get bad sectors over time.

[@Macabre215]

Did you try using SpinRite? Seems to always do the trick with my old mechanical drives.

[@magnum333]

Excellent video Phil. I'm using a different CF to IDE adapter, MSI 694T mobo, and I can't get more than 2 MB/s read speed on windows 98. (Can't enable DMA), rare, isn't it?

[@philscomputerlab]

Some boards and drives just don't work well together.

[@turborunner]

I'm trying the cf2ide adaptor with a kingston 600x 32gb cf card and it sees it but when i create the partitions in fdisk and i have also tried using the diskmanager once the system reboots the partitions are gone. is this because the kingston cf card is not compatible or is their a step i need to do so it works. im using it in a 486 at the moment will probably be putting another one in my 386 once i get this working.

[@turborunner]

I've also run diskpart on my modern machine and cleaned the card of the pre partition to see if that would work and it didn't.

[@dree6212]

But what about DOM SSD Disk On Module i have using them with great success in retro computing .

[@avongil]

I just bought one to use in a Sun Ultra 10. Hope it works - CF failed on that machine.

[@xaer0knight]

Compact Flash cards have some many different speeds. If your computer can not do ATA/66 don't get a card faster than x266.. I have a laptop that can only do ATA/33 (PIO-4). Its a great P3 600Mhz Win98SE Machine (HP Pavilion N3390 Laptop.. maxed the thing out!) I don't think I will see a speed difference between an 30GB EIDE 2.5 Laptop Hard drive and a 32GB CF Card, unless the Laptop's hard drive's 4MB CACHE and its 5400 RPM really really helps X-D Can't get the 30GB HDD to benchmark more than 23MB/s with Roadkill, Speedsys, HDAT2, & ATTO programs. SATA adapter cards... thank god for linux :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Jason Hicks Good to know. I've never had a premium / more expensive / high performance CF card. Always some cheap one from eBay :)

[@morsine]

Pro users: ejects USB Legends: ejects HDD

[@uzimonkey]

It's too bad about the performance on the CF. I'm gathering plans and parts for a small form factor and quiet Windows 9x machine for all my retro-gaming needs, and I was hoping to use flash memory.

[@philscomputerlab]

Don't give up on the plan just yet. The card I used was a cheap one from eBay. So if you got a decent one used for high speed cameras you might get better performance out of it. As you can see in the benchmarks, access time and read performance is quite good. It's just the write performance and maybe you aren't doing much of that. So I would give it a go, in real use you might not notice. The video was really to show the differences, each solution has its reasons for using it and CF cards are cheap, silent, small, compatible regarding size and also the adapters are cheap. So give it a go first and see how you find it. Personally I always install a lot of software and that's when I notice the difference the most.

[@uzimonkey]

philscomputerlab Well as you said for compact flash the board itself doesn't really do anything, CF is IDE/ATA anyway so the board is probably irrelevant. But it's a cheap option, I'll give it a shot.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes and please let me know how you go :) I'm always interested in other peoples experiences / opinions :)

[@MindJuggles]

I"m using a 32gb SATA SSD WITH IDE TO SATA Adaptor in my Pentium 3 550Mhz retro gaming pc.

[@philscomputerlab]

+MindJuggles 2000 Nice, that's some serious storage performance :)

[@Gamble4545]

Why don’t you use a king spec pata ssd? Yes, a 2.5 inch ide drive. 8 gb, up to 256 gb. I use multiple 64gb models for my dell CPI and dell c810. Drop in, 100% compatible with win 9x. Just a thought.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I meant to buy some DOM devices, but never found a decent deal it seems. If you have a link please share!

[@Gamble4545]

@@philscomputerlab I would buy two at this price. www.amazon.com/KingSpec-2-5-inch-Solid-SM2236-Controller/dp/B008RWKFYE

[@dallesamllhals9161]

Why not just buy a SATA to IDE adapter about $4 on ALI' even nowadays?

[@kalmtraveler]

I know this video is old so you may not see this but have you used either of those SIlicon Image SATA controllers to boot on an Asus socket 370 board? I'm trying to set up a retro rig with an Asus TUSL2-C motherboard and I've tried two of these Sil3114 cards, they see a connected DVD-ROM and SSD, but the machine won't boot to either device. I tried booting to an IDE drive to get Windows installed but even after that first step, upon reboot the SSD still won't work as a boot device.

[@philscomputerlab]

ODD booting is not supported. With new flash storage, try the fdisk/mbr command to make it boot!

[@kalmtraveler]

@@philscomputerlab aha! that makes sense - thanks Phil! Do you know if the lack of ODD boot support is due to the card/chip or system? Wondering if perhaps there are any old SAS/SATA PCI or PCI-X RAID controllers that would work

[@philscomputerlab]

@@kalmtraveler What I do, is connect the ODD to the onboard IDE, that always works. For the hard drive, there are lots of options, but PCI SATA controller should work well.

[@kalmtraveler]

@@philscomputerlab just wanted to share something that I've found this week - the Adaptec 1220SA SATA RAID card (PCI-E 1x) works fine in a SEDNA PCI-E 16x to PCI adapter, and according to its manual supports booting from SATA DVD/CD drives but I haven't got that to happen yet. Also, in a Star Tech PCI-E 1x to PCI adapter it doesn't detect any drives... Anyway, if I can get it to actually boot from CD this will be a great option so we don't need to rely on old IDE drives. One thing to note I have not found any pre-Windows 2000/NT drivers for this chip yet (so no 98SE/Me). There might be a generic ATA driver that will work so I will let you know if I find something.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I think that if you are using an OS that cannot handle large hard-drives then using a compact plash card might work except that the data storage might become a problem so... MS-DOS 3.2 and MS Windows 95 a compact flash card will work, MS Windows 98 OSRII maybe but I think that it would really require a hard-drive, MS Windows XP,Vista,7,8 all require hard-drives as will Windows 10. only MS Windows 7,8 and 10 can use SATA (AHCI) all the 95,98,XP don't have support for AHCI so cannot handle SATA. I think SCSI require hardware and software AHCI support for SCSI. I wonder if you where to put the system files on a 256GB CF card and install the game of your choice onto the cartridge you can turn all of your MSDOS 3.2 games into cartridges for fast loading Oh and how about making your computer look like a SNES or PC-ENGINE and mount the CF slot on the top so as to look the part.

[@swiftfox3461]

DAVID GREGORY KERR The cartridge idea is kind of what I had in mind at some point, but I rejected CF based on its cost (CRAZY expensive! Even for tiny ones and used!). In the end I decided on either on small laptop SATA drives, or small SD cards. For SD cards of course an SD->IDE adapter will be required.

[@armorgeddon]

Problem with the CF-cards and SSDs is the lack of sound and even the newer standard harddrives sound different to the older ones. I could connive this matter in most cases, but not in case of my old IBM-desktop, which had a very nice sound with it's original drive. So I'm actually trying to find a certain harddrive for sale to give my old IBM-desktop the same sound it once had. So if anybody has a Quantum ProDrive LPS 270AT 270 Mb IDE hard drive (IBM part number is FRU 82G5926, other aliases are Quantum TB27A471 and Digital RE24R-E) lying around please contact me :-)

[@pentiummmx2294]

how is SD to IDE for retro computing?

[@foo80]

Very helpful vid, but I find the background muzak annoying :) Maybe that's just me.

[@philscomputerlab]

LOL the music comes with the video editor. For videos that long it's not easy finding music and got to watch out for copyright. The other songs felt a bit too "energetic" for this one.

[@wolf2965]

It's a bit of a shame you don't have much experience with SCSI (technically: SCSI Parallel Interface, SPI) drives, as you have omitted one of the best options for the retro system: period correct SCSI HBA + semi-modern drive (e.g. U320). Whilst it is true that in some combinations you need drivers, in DOS these mainly amounted to allowing access to CDROM or more than 2 disk drives. Initial setup may require a bit of effort, but SCSI has a couple of advantages: generally higher bus transfer rate (until we get to generation of host adapters that can do UDMA5/UDMA6 modes, anyway) and more devices able to share the bus whilst using less IRQs at the same time. Particularly important in IRQ starved setups...

[@philscomputerlab]

I'm really interested but the drive in the video is the only SCSI device I have. In all my years of Computing SCSI hardware simply never made it's way into my hands. Not sure as for the reasons to be honest.

[@armorgeddon]

+philscomputerlab Same for me and it was always the costs, which were much higher for SCSI-components.

[@WR3ND]

Yeah, I never really used SCSI drives much either except on some machines I worked on for others when I was a teen two decades ago. This is one of the reasons I'm wanting a SCSI drive in my "new retro" 486 build.

[@jonchapman6821]

I’m glad you stopped using that god awful music in your videos 😩

[@henrikgustav2294]

these IDE - CF adapters are so fragile

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes especially the little pins! And the built quality is not that great! For something better quality checkout the StarTech SATA to IDE adapter, works really well. Or switch to IDE to SD cards, they are simpler to use and SD cards are everywhere.

[@mikv8]

The best solution out there is using SCSI. Compatibility is as good as it gets. Just get a decent UW-SCSI Adaptec controller (if you haven't one onboard on the motherboard), a 68-pin modern SCSI drive and forget about DMAs, master-slaves and all that nonsence. For DOS and Windows 98 drivers are optional, they increase performance, for Windows NT-2000-XP drivers are a must. The only downside is that SCSI will significantly increase your boot times, but you'll definately notice the performance increase as well. What's so great - you can put a fairly modern 300GB U320-SCSI 15K rpm (Cheetah 15K.5 for example) on any UW-SCSI controller and it will work in any motherboard eliminating 8GB, 127GB BIOS limits. You'll be also amazed how quiet the Cheetah 15K.3 and newer are.

[@eletro_doc9529]

A good alternative is using relatively new motherboards with socket 775, an AGP slot and SATA ports. Oftentimes they have integrated SATA controllers that work fine with modern drives.

[@audiocrush]

what is period correct about a 80gb hard drive in a dos computer?

[@dallesamllhals9161]

Don't be a HW-NAZI ;-P

[@MsJinkerson]

S.C.S.I. is not scuzzy I means small computer system Interface people uses the word Scuzzy is a scuzzy

[@younanm]

you know your shit.. thank you.. but get rid of the screeching violin in the background

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I know, it's one of my early videos :D