Harddrives

So, where to store your data? You obviously need a hard drive or two... or do you?

While it is still very much possible to find "spinning rust" IDE hard drives at a decent price, they are getting older and worn out, thus becoming more unstable. But there are (in my opinion) better solutions.

Compact Flash (CF) memory cards are, as the name implies, flash memory. Compact Flash uses the ATA protocol, so with the right adaptor, you can use a CF-card as an IDE hard drive. StarTech makes both an internal version and one that fits in a 3½" drive bay. Delock offers one that goes in a card expansion bay on the back of the pc, if you prefer not to have the card on the front.

If you are planning on dual-booting DOS and Windows 9x, I would recommend getting one of those allowing access to the card from the outside of the cabinet. This way, you can swap out the CF-card directly from the front of the PC, and have your operating systems on seperate cards.

There are other manufacturers, but be sure you get the right one! Some of the adaptors available only has a female IDE connector, meaning it plugs directly in to the IDE port on the motherboard! While it eliminates the need for a cable, it also means that you can only have that one device on that IDE channel. StarTechs adaptors have male connectors, so you can attach two of them to each channel, if you wish. They also have jumpers, allowing you to switch the devices from master to slave. Best of all: As they are flash memory, they are silent! No noise at all!

Lately, I have also seen similar adaptors that take SD cards instead of CF. I have no personal experience with them, though.

Size

Whether you get old, mechanical drives or go with CF-cards, there are some limitations you need to be aware of:

• If your BIOS is earlier than about 1994, you may experience problems with the pc only being able to use 504 MB of your disk.
• DOS 6 supports disks up to 8 GB. Even if your motherboard supports larger disks, only 8 GB will be available under DOS. Each partition cannot be larger than 2 GB.
• Older versions of DOS only supports smaller disks. DOS 5 only supports up to 512 MB, DOS 4 up to 128 MB, DOS 3 up to 32 MB and older 16 MB.
• Windows 95 supports disks up to 32 GB.
• Windows 98 supports disks up to 128 GB.

These are disk sizes, NOT partition sizes! You cannot have two 128 GB partitions on the same disk under WIndows, as it does not support 256 GB disks.

As long as your BIOS recoqnizes the drive, it will work, but you will only have the the space available supported by your operating system.