One interesting further crossover direction would be to go directly to a USB interface instead of CF/SD. The WCH CH376S lets you mount up a flash drive and address it by LBA sectors (or, more terrifyingly, navigate a FATxx filesystem), over an 8-bit parallel bus. I've seen it used for a few 8-bit micro projects, one of the new-XT-clone projects, and there's a card floating around for an 8-bit ISA interface. Sort of surprised it hasn't become more of a competitor to the CF adaptors, given that low-denomination CF cards are getting scarcer, while 2Gb flash drives are basically more expensive to pay shipping for than to buy.
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Will mechanical SATA drives ever be valuable?
- Thread starter kerr
- Start date
creepingnet
Veteran Member
Shoot, I'm using SATA in my Pre-Pentium systems now. My 486 has donned a 256GB SSD at least twice at this point (with 95 no less), I have a FitPC with XP on it that uses a mSATA to 44 pin adapter - which I've been tempted to try a different variant of to see if it will work in my Versa or DFI. I've got a stack of spinner SATA HDD with enough space to bring several vintage systems online with more space than one would know what to do with.
I don't miss spinning drives when I leave em'. Honestly, with re-fried Laptop batteries I can get almost 100% stock runtime out of a 30 year old laptop on 30 year old batteries that way, maybe better if I toss in a set of LED backlights in place of the CFLs. I'm in this for the long haul. Sure I love the sound, but it's nice when I know I can shake a vintage machine around and not worry about a head crash - like my old laptops.
I don't miss spinning drives when I leave em'. Honestly, with re-fried Laptop batteries I can get almost 100% stock runtime out of a 30 year old laptop on 30 year old batteries that way, maybe better if I toss in a set of LED backlights in place of the CFLs. I'm in this for the long haul. Sure I love the sound, but it's nice when I know I can shake a vintage machine around and not worry about a head crash - like my old laptops.
Caluser2000
Banned
All my systems use spinning rust. No exception 
Chuck(G)
25k Member
By and large, that's true for me. Some of the PATA drives have bit the dust and the equipment has been transferred over to use SATA. I use a couple of cheap 120GB SSDs as the root partition on a couple of systems, but /home is always spinning rust. I have enough old gear around that it's easy to keep whole-system backups via rsync for the stuff that matters. But I'm not a consumer of 12TB hard drives--most of my drives hold code, not pictures.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
I'm somewhat surprised myself that this chip hasn't been more popular, although per a recent thread about it there seems like the code floating around to drive it is in a pretty bad state. (And it also sounds like the performance is pretty miserable, although this may be a consequence of poorly optimized code, not a fair representation of what the hardware is capable of?) Maybe it just needs a skilled hacker to sit down and beat it into shape.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Shrug--a commodity MCU of sufficient power can easily host USB OTG. All that it requires is code. More than enough memory for other device drivers also.
But the USB-less vintage community is very small--and the number of folks who own these systems who want to use USB is even smaller.
Just saying...
But the USB-less vintage community is very small--and the number of folks who own these systems who want to use USB is even smaller.
Just saying...
Yep me too, I have the lo-tech experimental isa - usb card, The hardware is working after a bit of a hicup at first but the Chinese drivers are not great, The Boot ROM BIOS is pretty much useless, The DOS driver works fine but is slow in a PC/XT.
Caluser2000
Banned
Those are my HP/Compaq CQ62 laptop from around 2017(have a tonne of spares given to me for this so will be using it until my toes curl up) and the ASUS EeeBOX from 2005 or so. Havn't found a use for those firerbird or whatever ports on the later systems at all. PCI 2.0 usb cards come on handy for Socket 7/SS7/P1 era stuff like my K6-2 400 rig if you are trying out modern Linux though as well as some of the modern BSDs I suspect. They pick up the usb keyboards and mice in a pinch. You still may need an AT or PS/2 keyboard to acces and alter the Bios though...
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Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
I guess personally I've had such good luck with the PATA-to-SD adapters you can buy for about $10 working perfectly with the 8-bit XT-CF subset you can implement trivially with three chips or so that I consider affordable storage for XT-class machines a solved problem(*). An MCU on a stick is almost certainly going to be a little more of a hassle in terms of glue. But if someone did suck up doing the work so it was not only a reasonably performant storage device it also did something else useful ("being a network card" would probably be the most obvious thing, although there's also opportunities for roles like providing mouse support, etc) it could be a reasonable value proposition.
(* Of course there's no doubt that eventually they're going to discontinue any and all kinds of PATA bridge chips, but until that day comes it is certainly handy that you can still buy things off the shelf that are directly ISA bus compatible.)
Caluser2000
Banned
That's not hard to imagine. Sticking in a nic or a later faster serial and parallel ports is most likely quicker and you can do do more with them.
I can pop down to my local Jaycar electronics store in 5 minutes and pick up a null
modem, laplink or suitable patch cable to connect between my variuos systems old and new. The null modem cable is currently hooked up to my Redstone 10Mhz XT-Turbo(Dos/GeoWorks) and AmK6-2 400 (Linux)boxes.Say hi to P4 and 32-bt Boi.
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I prefer to use CF / SD and USB for transferring files, The only reason i keep NIC's around is for the Boot Rom socket these days, Can't be arsed with cable, haven't used cable for years.
Caluser2000
Banned
We all have different ways to do the same thing. Options and variety is good
If we all solved the same problem the same way this forum would be so boring.
Anyway young'ns who like playing with older tech but where there in those systemsa/software hey may just well be interested in what the oldies did back in the day. Trying to break in to a NETBEUI network via the internet using a cool retro terminal in WSL will be kept busy for a long long time.
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Hugo Holden
Veteran Member
I have got an odd feeling that one day Sata mechanical drives will be very valuable. The reason is that some especially were fantastically reliable. In a 2002 vintage HP computer I have, there is one in it called "Caviar Blue" . This drive has not missed a beat in 20 solid years of daily use. I cloned it as a precaution and have not had to use the clone drive yet. Maybe at this point in mechanical drive development, the year 2000 to 2007 time frame, the quality might have peaked, gone down after this , maybe, with clone drives from the far east. I have had many a computer along the way fail with later HDD's and I have also had defective solid state drives lasted a couple of years only. So there just might be some magic in these early , but not vintage, mechanical drives. I think NOS Sata drives swill increase in value, especially the super well made Caviar Blue variety. It could take another decade or two though for people to realize how good some of them were.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
I don't share your opinion about the WD Caviar blue drives. I recently had a 320GB one go belly-up suddenly. Fortunately, it was mirrored on another system, but I still had a sour taste in my mouth.
I don't know when shingling and PRML made their way into PC hard drive technology, but I'm not exactly sanguine about the long-term reliability of those techniques.
I don't know when shingling and PRML made their way into PC hard drive technology, but I'm not exactly sanguine about the long-term reliability of those techniques.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
In any random batch of... anything, really, there will always be one or two of Oliver Wendell Homes' "one hoss shays", and I'm sure that applies to Caviar Blue drives. Somewhere out there there's probably someone who swears a 20 gig IBM Deskstar is the most reliable hard drive ever made. As the window sticker says, your mileage may vary.
Al Kossow
Documentation Wizard
PRML,Veterbi encoding, fancier ECC, and GMR read heads were adopted in the mid 90s just after zoned recording, when they moved to putting DSPs in the read write channel.
Shingling was fairly recent, well after everyone moved to vertical recording to get above a terabyte on a 3.5" drive.
It would be nice to know the root cause for failures, but that is all in the black art of commercial drive recovery.
Head failures seem to be common, since there are sources for head stacks and installation combs
twolazy
Veteran Member
Shingling started I beleive with the IBM Deathstar line of 80-120gb drives. I think they referred to it as faerie dust at the time. I remember having 3 outta 4 80gb drives die within 2 years, and was in their lawsuit. In the end the lawyers won and I got like 18 dollars. LoL!
Funniest part is I swear by Hitachi enterprise drives now. Go figure.
Funniest part is I swear by Hitachi enterprise drives now. Go figure.
I have the feeling that there is so much model churn that it makes it possible to have some horrible reliability curve secrets. When a given model has a short retail life, I suspect you can get away with more "engineer to exactly the warranty" design. They can always say "that hasn't even been sold in 3 years" if people actually start joining the dots. Conversely, by the time you can get to a consensus of "well, the Barracuda 7200.34 is reliable" when by the time the news is out, the supply chain is packed with 7200.37s, with completely different sourcing and design.
It's sort of weird, because you'd think at least some sectors of the mechanical drive market are low-disruption. Those bottom-of-the-range 5400rpm, 500G or 1Tb drives presumably mostly used for cheap OEM computers... I doubt performance-wise they've changed much in a decade, but I'm betting there's absolutely model or major component carry-over from the 2012 catalog. I assume the cost of continual R&D and model churn must be paid off by shaving a nickel a year off each redesign.
It's sort of weird, because you'd think at least some sectors of the mechanical drive market are low-disruption. Those bottom-of-the-range 5400rpm, 500G or 1Tb drives presumably mostly used for cheap OEM computers... I doubt performance-wise they've changed much in a decade, but I'm betting there's absolutely model or major component carry-over from the 2012 catalog. I assume the cost of continual R&D and model churn must be paid off by shaving a nickel a year off each redesign.
twolazy
Veteran Member
Agreed. And there is a place for certain products that went outside the norm, say raptor drives. I can see those being collectable if not already. Early SSD's as well. I can see those being wanted by people in 10 or so years. Trying to have fun and connect with their youth, as vintage dream machines. The cycle repeats.