Saving old hard drives... Mileage in this?

[Hodgkinson]

Folks,
Long time no see and a merry Christmas too!

Question: I've just emptied a bunch of old 4GB IDE hard drives. What with the prevalence of both a. SATA drives, and b. Huge disks compared to what older systems were intended to run with; should I be considering saving them?

Or is there a convenient away around this these days that someone has come up with?

(Before said drives are stripped for the magnets and Molex sockets...)

Cheers!

[Matt_H]

Welcome back!

The chief advantage I see would be the fact that they're small enough to not require any workarounds (e.g., the various patches to prep/use drives larger than 4GB).  But the same can be accomplished these days with 4GB CF cards and an IDE adapter. The only thing to maybe consider is whether the CF card will hit its maximum number of write cycles before a traditional hard drive dies of mechanical failure. I'd say that's not very likely to happen. I'm using CF cards as hard drives in several of my machines and I'm soon going to convert my primary Amiga system to use one as well.

[mechy]

Folks,
Long time no see and a merry Christmas too!

Question: I've just emptied a bunch of old 4GB IDE hard drives. What with the prevalence of both a. SATA drives, and b. Huge disks compared to what older systems were intended to run with; should I be considering saving them?

Or is there a convenient away around this these days that someone has come up with?

(Before said drives are stripped for the magnets and Molex sockets...)

Cheers!

For IDE on amiga 600,1200,4000 etc the easiest way is to use a IDE to Compactflash adapter and use a cf card as a hard drive. you could also use ide to sata adapters that are cheap. Most Amigas cope fine with big drives to the terrabyte sizes with proper filesystems like sfs and pfs3. partitions must be under 128Gb each in many cases.
Amiga os3.9 deals with big hd's well,but os3.1 and earlier needs patching.

for most scsi 1 or 2 stuff there are:
1> scsi card readers such as pcd-47,50,60b-not so easy or cheap to find now.

2> acard 7720U,scsi to ide bridge, can be used with ide hd or ide to cf adapter and cf cards etc. this is the fastest solution yielding 9MB/s or so on fast scsi cards/scsi on accelerators. not cheap but a great solution.

3>acard 7720UW ultrawide scsi to ide bridge,great for cyberstorm ppc and MKIII ultrawide scsi.

4> acard 7730a Uwscsi to sata bridge, good for adding sata to csppc and MKIII etc.

5> scsi2SD, 50 pin scsi adapter to use a SD card on it. not great speed,especially on write,but beats nothing any day. fairly cost effective, amigakit has these now.

There are a few scsi to ide bridges made by yamaha and IoData but they are less common and probably as much as acards.
Addonics bridges are just relabeled Acard stuff,all update firmwares from acard work on them.

In short, its always handy to keep the drives around,never know when you need soemthing to test with real quick. Worst case sell them here or on ebay cheap, i am sure someone will want them.  I always keep old real hd's around for those cases when you are trying to eliminate variables.

[Hodgkinson]

Thanks for the comments folks

OK, So it seems IDE hard drives are somewhat useful, but can be easily worked around.

Good comments on the SCSI drives though - I have a stack of old server modest capacity SCSI drives that I'd probably better hang on to by the sounds of it!

Cheers,
Hodgkinson.

[mechy]

Thanks for the comments folks

OK, So it seems IDE hard drives are somewhat useful, but can be easily worked around.

Good comments on the SCSI drives though - I have a stack of old server modest capacity SCSI drives that I'd probably better hang on to by the sounds of it!

Cheers,
Hodgkinson.

The IBM Eserver scsi drives are 2.5" and slim like a laptop hd, they run fairly cool and are not too loud. If you run across some save them.. they are cheap on ebay also. they work well are are typically 36,73,146gb etc, i've seen a few 300 that are 80 pin sca.

[giZmo350]

In short, its always handy to keep the drives around,never know when you need soemthing to test with real quick. Worst case sell them here or on ebay cheap, i am sure someone will want them.  I always keep old real hd's around for those cases when you are trying to eliminate variables.

Best reason to keep a few around! I have at least two with fully functional Amiga OS's on them! Besides, there's nothing like the "whirrrrr" of a real HDD to let you know you have "power".

[danbeaver]

I never pitch or destroy a working hard drive; newer SATA drives (esp. DVD drives) need an inexpensive adapter, but I have a plastic storage bin of working drives because it is a waste to pitch them.  I would be happy to donate them for the cost of shipping, but I oft give them away in systems I rebuild.