Need a HD for old system, 10MB to 40MB

Instead of relying on an equally old replacement, why not stick an IDE to SD card adapter in there with an SD card? About the same cost from China as the UK postage for a properly packed 3.5" hard drive...

Indeed, we have been using the SD adapters to replace dying hard drives on IDE based arcade games for about a decade. They work very well...

John :-#)#

--
(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the newsgroup) 
John's  Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9 
(604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, Video Games) 
                      www.flippers.com 
        "Old pinballers never die, they just flip out."

How do you deal with the limited number of writes? I guess an arcade game doesn't do as many writes as something like a surveillance camera system???

I've been pulling 40GB drives out of old Tivo's.

Come on, if it's 10 or 40meg, it's either SCSI, or mfm. The latter was the ones that had the controller that plugged into the bus, and probably needed jumpers set, and then you had to set things in the bios as to size. A real complicated process.

It all got easier when IDE came along, putting the controller on the drive, and the drive kept track of the bad sectors.

Unless your description is off, you're going to have to dig. THose were crummy old drives, not useful keeping around once better ones came around. I fiddled with them, but never had one in a main computer. My first hard drive was an 80meg SCSI for a Mac Plus at the end of 1993. My second hard drive wsa really the 2gig hard drive in the Pentium I bought used in 2001, it was IDE.

Michael

True, these are mostly READ situations. I forgot about the write cycles issue. Pity you can't use one of the RAMTRON FRAM devices, they have something like 100 Trillion write cycles these days.

John :-#)#

--
(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the newsgroup) 
John's  Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9 
(604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, Video Games) 
                      www.flippers.com 
        "Old pinballers never die, they just flip out."

Because the drive is so old it's not IDE (unless it's scsi).

If it was IDE, then he could just get an adapter and a COMpactflash card.

The only hope is that it's an SCSI drive, I would think something larger would probably fit even if most of it was ignored.

Michael

Ah, yes, I recall the MFM drives from the 70s and 80s...pre-IDE indeed!

Well, there is at least one replacement for the old IBM-PC MFM interface and hard drive:

John :-#)#

--
(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the newsgroup) 
John's  Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9 
(604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, Video Games) 
                      www.flippers.com 
        "Old pinballers never die, they just flip out."

I have an old 40 meg MFM or whatever, full height 5-1/4" with the stepper motor to move the heads. I took the lid off and replaced it with acrylic so I could see the heads moving, and it still worked fine afterwards - they were not so sensitive to dust back then. I won't send it though - I like it and also it would cost too much to send.

Chris

Great idea, but all the slots are taken for the Project.

So, put the IDE/SATA adapter and a 2.5" SATA drive (or SSD) where the

3.5" drive used to go. It's about $60 to do the deed with new 60 GB solid state disk, power consumption goes down, speed goes up....

Win98 should be able to handle FAT32, which means you don't have to stick with really tiny drives if you don't want to. As far as I remember, the next "artificial" limit you will probably hit is the

540 MB one.

There is a local place that takes in old PCs, rebuilds the newer ones for sale, and sends the old ones to e-waste recycling. I suspect most such places have a rule that hard disks smaller than X GB go directly to recycling. If you can find such a place locally, tell them you're looking for a small hard drive, and then wait a few weeks for them to collect some, they'll probably sell you a few of them for cheap. The place here sells loose "small" hard drives (like 30 *G*B) for $5.

Before this existed, IDE-to-CF adapters were also available... they've been around long enough that you might find one of them used.

You could get 40 MB IDE drives. I had a new 386SX in about 1991 that had one. I know it was IDE, because a couple of years later, I added a

240 MB IDE drive on the same cable.

I *think* you could get 30 MB and possibly 20 MB IDE drives at the time, but I don't know if there were any smaller than that.

There was also a weird almost-IDE interface that (I think) was 8 bits wide rather than 16. It used exactly the same 40-pin connector as "real" IDE, but wouldn't work with "real" IDE drives. Some of the Tandy desktop models (Tandy 1000?) had this interface on the motherboard.

Matt Roberds

New IDE drives that support the "Host Protected Area feature set" can be programmed to lie about their size. I think this feature was added to ATA to make the huge, new drives work with old, busted BIOSes.