I've had a few HDDs pack in on me. It's painful to watch them slowly die as I put them through their last few paces. If they were animals I'd probably be imprisoned for cruelty!
I use Spinrite from time to time although I don't have the latest version. I put the HDD in this machine about 18 months ago and I haven't tested it yet, I guess I should although I probably want to get the latest version. A friend of mine ran Spinrite on her PC and it suggested a new SATA cable - how it worked that out I don't know but it did the job for her.
I'm considering putting a SSD in this PC purely to speed up boot time although I'm not really that fussed as it's always on, only rebooting when I need to due to critical updates. The thing I really want is to double the RAM to 16GB.
20 years ago I still had a PC with 4MB of RAM and a 40MB (yes - megabyte) hard drive. Can anyone remember Stacker?It would almost double your hard disk space by compressing the date but would randomly crash so you lost the lot.
My first computer in 1991 had 16 KB RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. It was on sale for $1700.Originally Posted by Straf
20 years ago I still had a PC with 4MB of RAM and a 40MB (yes - megabyte) hard drive. Can anyone remember Stacker?
Your RAM was also probably 4KB not MB if you had a 40MB HD.
My Battlemaps Gallery http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...p?albumid=3407
I know I doubled it so maybe it originally had 1MB. It certainly had more than 640KB. I fitted a sound card, a Soundblaster compatible that I bought in Liverpool from a shop next to the blood donor place. The hard disk was definitely 40MB though. The PC was a 386SX. The CPU had internal 32 bit registers but it only had a 16 bit bus. DOS could only handle 640KB in 64KB contiguous blocks. I had several autoexec.bat and config.sys configurations depending on what I was going to use the machine for. The loading order into that first 640KB was important.
It's been so long and so many computers ago, I don't remember half of it any more. I remember that my first was a 386, and a friend who "knew about computers" said I should just get a 286 because that was all the power I was ever going to need.
My Battlemaps Gallery http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...p?albumid=3407
I'm running a 480GB SSD as my main drive and it's nice to not be limited by disk seek time (the disk transfers are limited purely by my SATA 3gb interface). It's way better than the old ZX81 with cassette tape drive that I used way back when. I also have a few regular hard drives in the chassis that I use for things like photos or other things where speed isn't critical.
SSDs are nice to have, but even the SATA ones are a bit pricey at around $150-$200 for a 500GB unit. For mechanical hard drives, the cost is usually about 1/6 to 1/10 the cost per GB and they start in larger capacities. I would love to have one of the nvme (pci express) SSD, because they can run at speed of 3GB/s or more; they cost even more than SATA SSDs, though.
Hmmm ... Bogie. I do believe your memory is failing you. In the days when we were using PCs with two floppy drives and no hard drives, we already were running at 512 to 640 KB memory. That was the ceiling. IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS couldn't manage more than 640 KB then. But a PC with only 16 KB RAM? I don't think that beast ever was born.
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
<SNIP>
SSDs are great at boot-up time, but they also make a really tremendous difference when working with graphics (i.e. maps) that have file sizes at GB level. My main machine has three SSD drives totaling 1 TB plus a 2 TB SATA HDD and two Blu-ray burners and 32 GB RAM. I wouldn't want to work with less. That's light years from my first PC, an XT (8088 processor) with 512 KB RAM and one floppy drive, quickly expanded with a 20 MB HDD, a second floppy and another 128 KB RAM.
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
I'm sure Azelor is delighted by us old farts hijacking his thread to reminisce about the old days
Hmmm. Sorry about that. I scrolled up to the top of this page before and thought that this was the thread. I see now that it's Page 2. Apologies.I'm sure Azelor is delighted by us old farts hijacking his thread to reminisce about the old days
Now ...
Did I ever ell you guys about my first 80386 with two 50 MB HDDs?
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
It's alright, I've already been a thread hijacker myself.
It was kinda instructive. I didn't know that Raid wasn't just chemical products to kill insects.
Also my first computer, already outclassed at that time had less disk space that the cereal box game I was trying to play (about 40mb). It ran at an astounding 2 fps.
Posting Permissions
