• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

HDD and availabilty

U

uncleseth

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 14, 2008
Messages
50
Location
KY
Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone out there has thought about or had success with SATA to IDE adapters for hard drives. I'm finding it more and more difficult trying to locate sub 2GB hard drives to work with my 286, 386, and 486 all running some flavor of DOS. What I pay on ebay or craigslist for, if I can find them and they actually work, is close to what I can get a new SATA drive for. I'm also curious if the master/slave thing is viable with the first generation SATA drives. I guess I could live with just one HDD as primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master. Any thoughts and suggestions would be great. Also a source for old HDD would be nice too.

Thanks all,

Uncle
 
In my Super Socket 7 machines I use a PCI SATA controller. It must be one with a BIOS (the cheap ones are marked as RAID BIOS). I have used 640GB HDDs with a single 30GB FAT32 partition for MS-DOS 7.1.

You will have to know about capacity limitations. My conclusion is that a 30GB partition is a good limit, meaning everything will work.

I recommend PCI SATA over these adapters, as it solves the BIOS problem. The internal IDE channel / BIOS often can't handle such large drives.

For 486 and 386 boards I stick with CF cards. Haven't had any issues with them and they are great to work with. Also very cheap.
 
uncleseth said:
I was just wondering if anyone out there has thought about or had success with SATA to IDE adapters for hard drives. I'm finding it more and more difficult trying to locate sub 2GB hard drives to work with my 286, 386, and 486 all running some flavor of DOS... I guess I could live with just one HDD as primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master. Any thoughts and suggestions would be great. Also a source for old HDD would be nice too.
Click to expand...
I've got several drives under 2GB that are available. I've also got several over 2GB but under 10GB, too. You realize that no 286 or 386 and very few 486s have a BIOS that can deal with a drive over 528MB without a DDO so even a 2GB drive is going to present some sort of a challenge on these machines. Out of curiosity, why did you choose 2GB as a cutoff?
 
Well, whatever you do, stay away from this Kingwin garbage: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...6024&cm_re=sata_to_ide-_-12-226-024-_-Product

They don't work as slave, and they are often so buggy they can lose data.

I have had fairly good success with these Vantec converters:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232020&Tpk=CB-SP200
This one has two ports so you can connect one SATA drive as master, and another as slave. And since this attaches to a motherboard IDE header, (awkward on an ISA card IDE), you can get rid of the fat IDE cables and use thin SATA cables. Only catch is if you need to combine SATA and IDE devices on one IDE header.

But the lowest I have tried these on is a Pentium 1. You could easily run in to compatiblity problems with early IDE ports. Of course there are the BIOS limits you will have to work around, but you probably already know that.

For systems with PCI slots, I recommend Via 6421 based SATA cards because the VIA drivers work with Windows 95 (And support terabyte drives). Just make sure you get one with a functional BIOS - for some reason many shiped without BIOS chips, or with faulty chips.
 
Stone said:
I've got several drives under 2GB that are available. I've also got several over 2GB but under 10GB, too. You realize that no 286 or 386 and very few 486s have a BIOS that can deal with a drive over 528MB without a DDO so even a 2GB drive is going to present some sort of a challenge on these machines. Out of curiosity, why did you choose 2GB as a cutoff?
Click to expand...

Are you interested in letting a few go?

I do understand about the BIOS limitations so I know that a lot of disk space would be unused. I thought that MS-DOS 6.22 could handle HDD up to 2GB using the FAT16B if the BIOS was compatible of course. My 486 does have PCI slots. I'm not an expert by no means on any of this stuff as you can probably tell. I haven't messed with this in 30 years so it's a little rusty to me. The CF cards are peaking my interest as well.

EDIT: how about this? Google the following: CF1EH adapter
 
Last edited:
uncleseth said:
Are you interested in letting a few go?
Click to expand...
As usual, when you've cleaned him out I've got a few more ;-)

I do understand about the BIOS limitations so I know that a lot of disk space would be unused. I thought that MS-DOS 6.22 could handle HDD up to 2GB using the FAT16B if the BIOS was compatible of course.
Click to expand...
As a matter of fact if the BIOS or DDO allow it MS-DOS 6.xx can handle drives up to 8GB, with a limit of 2GB on any logical drives (not necessarily partitions); e.g. a 2GB active primary partition and a 6GB extended partition containing 3 x 2GB logical drives.

Or you could use one of the DOS 7.x versions (e.g. from W98 )...
 
Last edited:
uncleseth said:
Are you interested in letting a few go?
Click to expand...
Yes, that's what I meant by available. :)

uncleseth said:
I do understand about the BIOS limitations so I know that a lot of disk space would be unused. I thought that MS-DOS 6.22 could handle HDD up to 2GB using the FAT16B if the BIOS was compatible of course. My 486 does have PCI slots.
Click to expand...
6.22 can handle partitions up to 2GB -- four of them -- which means that if your BIOS can handle drives up to 8GB 6.22 can use all of the drive.

If you have PCI on your 486 it probably has a BIOS that can handle drives over 528MB. Basically, 1994 is the year that the 528MB BIOS limitation was resolved. If your BIOS is pre-1994 it probably can't see over 528MB and if it's post-1994 it probably can.
 
Some PCI adapter cards don't support autoboot. I purchased a PATA<>SATA adapter originally for a friend who needed a new drive but didn't have an SATA port on his mobo. I now have it used for a new board with no PATA controller. It works nicely!
 
dorkbert said:
perhaps CF card + IDE/CF adapter as someone else already suggested? I have a K6 running fine with 2GB CF cards.
Click to expand...

My main DOS machine has been running with an 8GB CF card 24/7 for over two years now. I notice adapters are down to under two bucks, so it's not going to be expensive to experiment. Here is and old thread about my original adventure.
 
I have also been using the same CF cards for several years now and it's a fantastic solution.

Then there are micro drives as well. Same form factor as CF cards, but a lot slower.

My other favourite solution is using a PCI SATA card, a notebook drive bay and a 250 or 320 GB notebook SATA drive. I use a single 30GB partition and it has been flawless.
 
I use NICs and/or LapLink to connect various machines to another machine that has a HDD. That way I avoid having to buy additional HDDs. There are also places (like www.acsoutlet.com) where you can buy OEM HDDs at a reasonable price for IBM PS/2s & VPs for example.
 
PeterLI said:
I use NICs and/or LapLink to connect various machines to another machine that has a HDD. That way I avoid having to buy additional HDDs. There are also places (like www.acsoutlet.com) where you can buy OEM HDDs at a reasonable price for IBM PS/2s & VPs for example.
Click to expand...

That doesn't completely eliminate the need for HDDs
Some things can only be run from a local disk and don't forget about machines with missing or bad drives.
 
uncleseth said:
I was just wondering if anyone out there has thought about or had success with SATA to IDE adapters for hard drives. I'm finding it more and more difficult trying to locate sub 2GB hard drives to work with my 286, 386, and 486 all running some flavor of DOS.
Click to expand...

Just use compact flash cards and a CF-to-IDE adapter. Every one I've tried has worked great, even in XTs with an 8-bit IDE adapter (ADP50, not the XTIDE project cards, although those are awesome too).

If you really want some IDE drives I've got some 320MB and 540MB IDE drives I'm not using; shoot me an email.
 
I don't have any spare MFM drives (hate them anyway) but I do keep tons of small IDE and SCSI drives around (and they seem to still be reliable). I suggest you find a local scrapper and make a deal for old drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top