Old hard drives

Cyber-Mav

Cyber-Mav

Cyber-Mav

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Back in the day when i had a 486 i remember the hard drive being real small and i think it was but cant be sure a 250 megabyte drive. I know some kids with the 386 computers had like 40mb drives and at some point i did have some 2 gigabyte drives from seagate lying around but were binned due to small capacity.

Searching for drives this old is impossible since google keeps mistaking megabytes as gigabytes lol and just giving me results for large modern drives.

Im trying to find out performance metrics for these old drives, how fast they were in data transfer and access and iops etc but nothing.
Anyone got any info on old drive performance?
 
Found some information, rather than look for info on the hdd itself i checked on the interface speed and ata PIO mode 4 was like 16mb per second. So getting somewhere
Im sure i had a hard drive that was bigger than the 3.5inch drives physically. It was quantum branded.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
Found some information, rather than look for info on the hdd itself i checked on the interface speed and ata PIO mode 4 was like 16mb per second. So getting somewhere
Im sure i had a hard drive that was bigger than the 3.5inch drives physically. It was quantum branded.
Click to expand...
Bigfoot
 
Cyber-Mav said:
Back in the day when i had a 486 i remember the hard drive being real small and i think it was but cant be sure a 250 megabyte drive. I know some kids with the 386 computers had like 40mb drives and at some point i did have some 2 gigabyte drives from seagate lying around but were binned due to small capacity.

Searching for drives this old is impossible since google keeps mistaking megabytes as gigabytes lol and just giving me results for large modern drives.

Im trying to find out performance metrics for these old drives, how fast they were in data transfer and access and iops etc but nothing.
Anyone got any info on old drive performance?
Click to expand...
I think you're slight over estimating the drive sizes.

My first 486 33DX had a 40MB drive which I upped to a 80MB. The Macs I had the time had similar sized drives but SCSI.
You can see this by looking at the shipped spec of Macs. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_lc/specs/mac_lc_ii.html

Hard to find info on benchmarking these drives

IDE vs SATA - Difference and Comparison | Diffen

What's the difference between IDE and SATA? IDE and SATA are different types of interfaces to connect storage devices (like hard drives) to a computer's system bus. SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (or Serial ATA) and IDE is also called Parallel ATA or PATA. SATA is the...
www.diffen.com www.diffen.com
goughlui.com

Hard Drive Performance Over the Years

One of the primary motivators of The Hard Drive Corner was to understand how hard drive performance has changed over the years. With subtle incremental upgrades, it’s often easy to be unaware…
goughlui.com goughlui.com

Why the interest?
 
Haha i may be overestimating stuff this is 25 years ago or more lol.

I was just watching some nostalgia nerd and lgr or ljr is it and it got the old gears turning in my head. I never knew how fast the hdd was compared to cd etc since i never had benchmark software back then or would have thought to run it and i dont remember windows 3.1 or 95 showing the transfer speed of file copying.

Also i believe i had a drive made by connor? Where they gone now.
 
I know I had a 486 DX2 66 in 1994 which had a 400MB hard drive in it. I still have the drive lurking about somewhere for whatever reason.

Not sure on performance exactly but I know an Award BIOS sees it as PIO mode 4 which makes a max interface speed of 16.7MB/sec. I imagine the drive would get nowhere near that, a bit like mech HDs these days supporting SATA2 or 3.

I also remember the Quantum Bigfoot drives and I know a friend had one but I think that was a bit later on, like when drives hit ~10GB or so capacities. I remember seeing plenty of SCSI drives in the late 90s/early 00s that were 3.5” wide but were double height drives. I’m sure a bunch of earlier IDE drives were like that too.
 
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I know when I ordered my 486 I bought a 40mb disk, but as soon as it arrived I upgraded it to 80mb. Exciting times though. Golden era of computers. Especially on the Mac side.
 
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In terms of HD the performance side was all scsi, narrow, wide and ultra wide and the hassle of SCSI terminators. We had those on the Mac and high end PCs.
 
Relevant :) Never heard of MFM drives before watching this.


My first PC had a 630MB hard drive, would have been in the mid 90s.
 
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Duke said:
Relevant :) Never heard of MFM drives before watching this.


My first PC had a 630MB hard drive, would have been in the mid 90s.
Click to expand...

you must be a whipper snapper then :cry:... my first hard drive was a seagate 40mb MFM drive, probably the same variant as in the video. My first PC was a 386sx 25 it was a barebone's build where the supplier gives you the mobo/cpu case and psu. i scraped together the rest from second hand a parts from a bloke my dad new in the pub.. the disk controller for the MFM drive was ancient and was a full length card.. my Dads PC at the time wasa 386dx 20 and that had a full height (2x5.25 cd rom bays) 100mb MFM drive... My mums Amstrad PC1512 didnt even have a hard drive. just 2x 5.25 360k floppy drives
 
Yes that is a little before my time for PCs. We had an Acorn Electron when I was very young then I got a C64 then Amiga. My brother had a PC first, 486 DX2-66 then my first later was a Cyrix 586 100MHz (awful CPU :p) in the mid 90's when I was in secondary school :) So in PC terms I've only known and worked with IDE/EIDE/SCSI (ISE/PCI) onwards and not heard of MFM :o
 
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Duke said:
Yes that is a little before my time for PCs. We had an Acorn Electron when I was very young then I got a C64 then Amiga. My brother had a PC first, 486 DX2-66 then my first later was a Cyrix 586 100MHz (awful CPU :p) in the mid 90's when I was in secondary school :) So in PC terms I've only known and worked with IDE/EIDE/SCSI (ISE/PCI) onwards and not heard of MFM :o
Click to expand...

Ive still got my Acorn Electron as well with the Plus 1 Expansion, it lives on the wall now..

Txol7Fe.jpg
 
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The 286 we had when I was a kid had 20MB HDD and was around 2-3MB/s IIRC - that was with an upgraded ISA interface which included Winchester drive support :o

Apparently the standard interface was just under 600KB/s.
 
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First hard drive I used was in Sept 1982, in a Comart Z80 CP/M system, it was 5MB "Winchester" hard drive...wow Look at all those files when you do a "dir".

I bought a 152 MB harddrive for a HP development platform in the 1988, £4780, I still have the invoice. Worked on the SCSI interface. Came in its own massive enclosure with PSU etc, and in total weight around 20KG. That's approximately £31 per MB, or 3p per KB :), must be one of the highest costs per MB that most have come across.

Bought a 2nd hand 55MB one for the same platform £1750 in the same year.
 
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