Category Archives: Storage

Every Bit Matters

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A couple of months ago the OS/2 Museum got hold of a 13.6 GB Fujitsu MPE3136AT IDE drive from 1999. The drive was working… more or less. It behaved quite strangely; the drive was detected and readable, but seemed oddly … Continue reading →

Posted in Fixes, PC hardware, Storage | 6 Comments

Decoding Seagate Date Codes

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Michal Necasek

More or less everyone knows that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Seagate did not label their drives with a date of manufacture like everyone sane would do, but instead used a custom and somewhat mysterious/confusing “date code”. For reasons that … Continue reading →

Posted in PC history, Seagate, Storage | Leave a comment

Seagate Cheetah Date of Manufacture

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Lately I found myself in the possession of several Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives. These represent the pinnacle of hard disk engineering; with 15,000 RPM, the drives deliver up to around 200 MB/s sustained throughput (both read and write!) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Seagate, Storage, Undocumented | Leave a comment

OS/2 1.3 on a “Large” Disk

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Michal Necasek

In response to a reader question, I started wondering how difficult it actually is to install OS/2 1.3 on a “big” hard disk, where “big” is defined as more than about 500 MB. In an attempt to reduce the number … Continue reading →

Posted in BusLogic, OS/2, PC history, Storage | 16 Comments

A Brief Visit to Disk Geometry Hell

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Several weeks ago I thought I’d install NetWare 3.12 in a virtual machine using the BusLogic SCSI controller emulation. While configuring a 1.5 GB virtual drive, I thought I should be safe and not run into any trouble with a … Continue reading →

Posted in BusLogic, IBM, NetWare, PC architecture, Storage | 32 Comments

Historical ATA Standard Drafts

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Michal Necasek

After some digging, I discovered that several old drafts of the original ATA standard (later known as ATA-1) have been out in the public all along, or at least for a very long time, cleverly hiding among hundreds of SCSI-related … Continue reading →

Posted in IDE, PC history, Storage | 15 Comments

CF/IDE/SCSI Benchmark Update

Posted on April 22, 2017 by Michal Necasek

To see how the CF-to-IDE-to-SCSI solution really performs, I tried it in a slightly faster system. GA-586HX motherboard (Intel 430HX chipset), AMD K5-133 processor, and PCI SCSI HBAs. The first tested configuration was using a Tekram DC-390 HBA. Sysinfo showed 8.7 … Continue reading →

Posted in CompactFlash, SCSI, Storage | 12 Comments

More Data on CF to IDE to SCSI

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Michal Necasek

To get a better picture of the performance of the CF to IDE to SCSI solution, I moved the Adaptec 1542C into one of my favorite boards, the Alaris Cougar with a classic Intel 486 DX2 OverDrive CPU. For a … Continue reading →

Posted in 486, CompactFlash, IDE, Storage | 16 Comments

More on CF Cards

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This is a follow-up to an earlier post. Some interesting information turned up in reader comments and elsewhere. To recap, certain operating systems (notably Windows) behave unreasonably when using and especially when installed on CF drives that report themselves as … Continue reading →

Posted in CompactFlash, Storage | 8 Comments

Removable CF Card, or Not

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This is from the “learn something new every day” category. I’ve been using CompactFlash cards together with IDE adapters for several years now. It’s a terrific way to manage storage for vintage PCs. CF cards are cheap, fast, (relatively) capacious, … Continue reading →

Posted in CompactFlash, Storage, ThinkPad | 19 Comments