Your 1st Hard Disk purchase, tell us ALL about it.

[Keatah]

What was the first hard drive you ever purchased?

 

I got mine in 1985/1986. It was a 10MB Sider from First Class Peripherals and made for the Apple II with interface through SASI. It was (still is) a huge honk'n thing about the size of a small/mid tower PC. Just under the size of a Corvus Constellation¹. I got it through mail order and paid around $600-$700 for it.

 

I mainly used it for BBS'ing back then. As an upgrade from a 2-floppy system to a 10megger. Remember it being faster than normal floppy drives, naturally, but only a tiny bit faster than a floppy with something like Diversi-Dos or Hyper-DOS or any other "fastloader" patches. Why was that? The Apple II was limited by the bus speed, external hardware could easily go much faster, but hit the brakes when it got on the bus.

 

This drive had a stepper-motor band mechanism for moving the heads. Makes this chirping sound as it seeks the tracks. It and its motor echoes and resonates in the chassis. So rather loud, like a full-speed GPU fan. All metal construction. Runs at 3150 RPM and the discs themselves, 4 or 5 platters, are 5" in diameter.

 

One of it's most useful attributes was having the all that space available - though I still played from floppies because not all games could be put on an HDD. Not like with the ProDOS packs/ports and disk images and Everdrive flash technology of today.

 

1- The Corvus HDD is something we had in the computer lab in high-school. It projected an air of futuristic sophistication both in looks and functionality. A big white box that had a mainframe look to it. Had the "disk pack" look to it. The "digital" brand look. Like I say, mainframe!

Edited September 9, 2022 by Keatah

[Tanooki]

It was a gift in the first home computer.  I only remember it because it was just that and because I kept it as a slave drive for quite a few years after for some basic smaller sized pre-CD era stuff.  It was a Maxtor drive, a whole whopping 80MB of space from a 1990 Christmas 386SX16 PC.  I remember stepping up to a 320MB drive after that so I had 400 at the time which was pretty decent around 1992-93 (486DX33 pc.)

[20ohm20]

80GB Seagate SCSI 3.5" inside of a Trumpcard 500 with the optional 2MB RAM expansion.  Purchased for my Amiga 500 in late 1989/early 1990.  I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it was extremely expensive at the time.

[Keatah]

Surely that'd be 80MB? Yes of course..

 

I wouldn't get a PC with a cavernous 212MB till late 1992. This HDD would be the 2nd one I purchased. It was standard on my 486 and the capacity was beyond comprehension, so I didn't even try. It made the whole DOS/Windows experience a real treat. Stuff just flew by like nobody's business! I was loading 8MB games in seconds without swappage! I don't think I would experience that magnitude of performance jump ever again. Coming from an Amiga 500 + floppy only setup. Everything since has been incremental.

 

I had a tiny tiny bit'o excitement with SSD in the first i7 I built a while ago. But I was pre-conditioned to expect oodles of speed. So it was not a big deal. It just kind of happened.

 

Now we're getting consumer-level NVME SSD that're approaching 10GB sec transfer rate. Truly frightening, but not wow-shocking. Because it's expected.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Keatah

[Steven Pendleton]

I built a computer by myself for the first time in either late 2007 or early 2008 and I bought a hard drive of some type and size at Best Buy and put it in there. That's all that I can remember other than that it was probably bigger than the 40GB one I had been using previously.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Steven Pendleton

[atarian1]

Syquest 44MB removable hard drive for the Atari ST. I never liked the idea that once you filled up a hard drive, that's it. You need to buy another one or start deleting stuff off of it. It was such a turn off compared to floppies that  you could just buy another box of when a floppy disk was full. When the Syquests started coming down in price and increasing in popularity, it certainly piqued my interest. I don't remember what finally made me purchase one though. Syquests and all removable hard drives before the Zip drive were more expensive than fixed hard drives.

[+save2600]

Wasn't until the early 90's that I really wanted a hard drive. Value wise, pretty much felt the same way as atarian1 and considering most Amiga games didn't even have HD installers - didn't make much sense for me to invest in one all those years. When a lot of stuff started coming out on 4+ disks though I said screw it and looked into upgrading my A1200. Back then, 2.5" laptop drives were stupid expensive. Settled on a 3.5" 400mb Western Digital Corsair, which even with its external Dataflyer case, was about the same price as an 80-120mb 2.5" drive. Yeah, I had to cut a couple of notches out the back of my A1200's case so the ribbon cable would fit - but at least I could easily replace/upgrade the HD down the road when needed.

[+littaum]

I don't quite remember what brand my first hard drive was, only that it was for a IBM PC compatible in the early 90's, and the hard drive crashed while I was playing Michael Jordan in Flight - and that was the last time I played that game!  

 

Given the reliability of hard disks back then (IBM deskstar click of death anyone?) it's amazing any data survived from back then.

[MrMaddog]

My very first hard drive I bought used from someone from the local Atari ST user group.  It cost my $60 total with $20 for each of the parts (case, drive & controller card).

 

Not even a month later the drive motor died and I tried to get my money back.  Only had $40 returned for the case & controller but he wouldn't give me anything back for the defective drive.

 

I said screw upgrading STs, I'm saving up for a PC instead...

 

[Keatah]

9 hours ago, atarian1 said:

Syquest 44MB removable hard drive for the Atari ST. I never liked the idea that once you filled up a hard drive, that's it. You need to buy another one or start deleting stuff off of it. It was such a turn off compared to floppies that  you could just buy another box of when a floppy disk was full.

When I filled a drive I'd go on a zipping spree. Compress data with WinRAR or similar and gain about 20-30% extra space¹. After I'd manually compress the least-used stuff, the drive would fill again, naturally, and I'd just go buy another one. Ad infinitum.

 

I never thought I was wasting money on drives or taking a sucker punch from the industry. I paid X dollars for X amount of space and that's what I got. And it didn't shrink over time. And I never thought about it again.

 

Did a brief stint with Zip Disks, but I found my rate of accumulation and the size of files was growing faster than my ability to run to the store and get more disks. Then MP3 hit the scene and I ripped all my CDs, overwhelming any hope of using Zip Drives. I even saw that Syquest and JAZ drives would be of limited use. Removable HDD would be the way forward and still remains my preferred method for backups and archives.

 

I still use my Parallel Port ZipDrive to transfer data to/from the ol'486 these days.

 

1- In the early 486 days I successfully used DoubleSpace & DriveSpace on-the-fly compression. Never experienced any data loss. I stopped using it in my quest to simplify, one less layer. And it was a bit cumbersome when used on removable USB drives. But otherwise it was a great magical bit of software. Turned my 212 megger into a 300! I also didn't want a large container file abstracting or confusing defrag maps.

[atarian1]

17 hours ago, save2600 said:

Wasn't until the early 90's that I really wanted a hard drive. Value wise, pretty much felt the same way as atarian1 and considering most Amiga games didn't even have HD installers - didn't make much sense for me to invest in one all those years. When a lot of stuff started coming out on 4+ disks though I said screw it and looked into upgrading my A1200. Back then, 2.5" laptop drives were stupid expensive. Settled on a 3.5" 400mb Western Digital Corsair, which even with its external Dataflyer case, was about the same price as an 80-120mb 2.5" drive. Yeah, I had to cut a couple of notches out the back of my A1200's case so the ribbon cable would fit - but at least I could easily replace/upgrade the HD down the road when needed.

Yes, that's it. I was starting to get into Sierra On-Line games. I started out with Leisure Suit Larry 2 which came on three floppies. It look a looong time to load each scene, but at least it was "linear" game where you had to solve one puzzle to go onto the next. Once I got Larry 3 which came on 4 floppies AND you did not have to solve puzzles in any sequential order (mostly), disk swapping became more frequent = pain in the arse. Good thing Sierra allowed their games to installed on a hard drive because the disk swapping was starting to drive me crazy.

[Goochman]

1987 (?) 20MB ICD (I believe) HD for my Mega 2 ST.  I thought I had endless storage!  6 months later I sold that and got an ICD-Fast (could hold 2 drives) with 1 80MB drive.  That pretty much carried me to my first PC-Clone.

 

[jhd]

 

My first PC (Christmas 1988) was a Tandy 1000 SL. 

 

This included DOS and the Deskmate kernel in ROM, so it booted almost instantly. It had 5.25 and 3.5 drives, but no hard drive.

 

I was told (perhaps incorrectly) that the only way to upgrade it was with a proprietary Tandy "Hard Card" (a drive and controller combined on a single expansion card), which was significantly more expensive than a standard hard drive and controller card.

 

In 1993, I upgraded to a Dell 486 which included my very first a hard drive. I do not recall the capacity, but I do remember that it came with tons of pre-installed apps. I was initially excited, until I realized that I would never use most of them. I continued to use it through 1998 when I moved away from home to further my education. 

 

   

   

[zzip]

I didn't get one until the early 90s.   Couldn't justify the prices and capacity of the 1980s.   $600 for 10mb?  That's about the storage capacity of a box of floppies,  no thanks.

 

When I finally got one for my ST, it was a second hand Seagate,  5.25" full height,   around 128mb capacity.   Came in a large, ugly case but had an ICD host adaptor and SCSI<->RLL adaptor.   Also had an empty drive bay for which I bought a second RLL drive to add another 40mb.

 

It was a game changer and made the ST much more usable,  I could load every ACC and TSR I wanted so I'd have everything customized to my liking.

[Keatah]

4 hours ago, jhd said:

My first PC (Christmas 1988) was a Tandy 1000 SL.

This included DOS and the Deskmate kernel in ROM, so it booted almost instantly. It had 5.25 and 3.5 drives, but no hard drive.

I was told (perhaps incorrectly) that the only way to upgrade it was with a proprietary Tandy "Hard Card" (a drive and controller combined on a single expansion card), which was significantly more expensive than a standard hard drive and controller card.

That'd depend on how you had your floppies setup. It had standard ISA 8-bit slots, so you just needed available drive bay space. Most folks didn't want to trade a floppy for an HDD exclusively - that meant a hardcard was the more popular method. But you could do either, a hardcard or standard drive + controller + cable.

 

From what I understand, all hardcard style drives of the early era were pretty unreliable and some had 100% fail points. Something to do with head retention after retraction.

 

4 hours ago, jhd said:

In 1993, I upgraded to a Dell 486 which included my very first a hard drive. I do not recall the capacity, but I do remember that it came with tons of pre-installed apps.

The capacity was likely in the 500MB range. I had a 212MB in late 1992, and eventually got a 540 not long after.

 

4 hours ago, jhd said:

I was initially excited, until I realized that I would never use most of them. I continued to use it through 1998 when I moved away from home to further my education.

I recall being totally thrilled with just getting a real computer with a real operating system. I even had the opportunity to pick one application. Picked MS-Word 2.0A because that was main reason for getting a PC. To have a real word processor! I remember it being free, or, rather, buried in the price deep enough to be called "free".

 

That's what would start my ongoing love affair with MS-DOS, Windows, and Office, Especially Office! Still have it all, including the meter-high pile of documentation. Woot!

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I didn't get one until the early 90s.   Couldn't justify the prices and capacity of the 1980s.   $600 for 10mb?  That's about the storage capacity of a box of floppies,  no thanks.

When I was doing my A2 BBS it wasn't as much about raw capacity as it was having multiple disks online simultaneously. Variety was key. Just going beyond 2 disk drives was huge and elite! Even a 200-sector ramdisk (about 50-60K) was magnificent and gained the Sysop extra status amidst peers.

 

In the Apple II world, a disk could hold about 286Kbytes, if you punched a hole for the reverse side. So in practical real-world usage about 40 volumes/sides would be available to a caller.

 

Recollection: Callers would be totally blown away that a directory request (on ramdisk) happened instantly. Whereas on floppy it would take 1 second to spin up, and then swing the head into position. And both 300/1200 callers noticed that! I fondly consider the early ramdisks akin to modern SSDs.

 

Recollection: Most A2 BBSes ultimately topped out at 10-20MB, there were a couple that eeked to 40MB but I never got around to calling them as we were still on "call packs" and they were out of range. Not sure why they topped out at 40MB, was it a tech limit of HDD? Was it cost? Apple II users were rich fuckers so can't be tha!? Maybe it was modem speeds, we were still farting around with elite 2400 baud..? And to really explore 40MB, speeds would need to be much faster or else a single user could tie it up for hours or days. Or maybe anything bigger just didn't make sense..?

 

Note: Never ever considered an HDD on the Apple II for archiving or storage or any kind of preservation, not like today. No. I had thousands of disks, cartons full that instantly overwhelmed my RadioFlyer, or prevented me from closing the trunk of the old Chevy. It was clearly just too much.

 

Trivia: Today is 1982, and you're tasked with hauling 20TB of data. Looks like you'll need to rent a convoy of 74 semis to hold 140,000,000 floppies.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

When I finally got one for my ST, it was a second hand Seagate,  5.25" full height,   around 128mb capacity.   Came in a large, ugly case but had an ICD host adaptor and SCSI<->RLL adaptor.   Also had an empty drive bay for which I bought a second RLL drive to add another 40mb.

 

It was a game changer and made the ST much more usable,  I could load every ACC and TSR I wanted so I'd have everything customized to my liking.

Very good. Seems ST users did more with HDDs than Amiga guys. Always hear about that. I'm willing to bet that HDD on Amiga would have changed my whole tenure with the platform. Alas.. Price!!

[zzip]

12 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Very good. Seems ST users did more with HDDs than Amiga guys. Always hear about that. I'm willing to bet that HDD on Amiga would have changed my whole tenure with the platform. Alas.. Price!!

I think the Amiga would have benefited from HD even more,  way too much disk flipping there on a single floppy Amiga system in my limited experience with it.

 

Cost was a problem on ST too.   ST even had the ACSI port that was based on the SCSI draft, in spite of that it still needed rather pricey hardware to convert it to true SCSI, that plus the cost of an external unit  (external drive cases back then were not cheap like the USB ones we can get today)

 

And the Mega STs had space inside the case that looked like it was designed to hold a 3.5" hard drive, but it doesn't seem like it was ever used for that purpose (not officially), people were still connecting external HD units.   It wasn't until the Falcon that an Atari had an IDE port to attach cheap(er) internal hard drives, but that was right before the product line got discontinued

[glazball]

My first HDD purchase was a 40MB Maxtor around 1991, an upgrade from the 10MB drive that came in my computer.  Funnily enough, I have a box of old computer crap and I'm pretty sure I still have that HDD.  No idea how I would even begin to look at it to see if the data is still there.  I am rather curious what the hell might have been on there - probably Wolfenstein 3D and Epic Pinball.  It's like a time capsule that I'll probably never open.

[BydoEmpire]

I really, really, really wanted the 20mb "sidecar" hard disk for my A500... but alas when I went to college I ended up getting a 386 that had a hard drive... I *think* it was 120mb, but I could be misremembering, maybe it was 40mb or 80mb. That'd be my first, and it was 1991.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I think the Amiga would have benefited from HD even more,  way too much disk flipping there on a single floppy Amiga system in my limited experience with it.

Absolutely was a lot of disk swapping. As a green teen I didn't understand why the industry couldn't do something about it! I remember having to boot the main OS/Workbench, then load PhotonPaint, if I wanted to draw something.. That was 2 swaps right there. And more if I wanted to save my work. Not counting any "in-program" swaps if parts of a library were needed.

 

Forget the much-vaunted multitasking capabilities. You'd have to "manually manage" all the disk i/o, swap'n'swap'n'swap! And more swap! Like the whole context needed to be changed out to do something else. Made worse by 512K or 1MB RAM. Hated it! Out of the box multitasking was limited to having a clock and calculator and maybe 1 other program going.

 

Just remembered when I was going back and forth about getting an Amiga or ST.. The Amiga won over the ST simply because the amount of simultaneous colors onscreen was greater, and Amiga had something called a blitter. Otherwise I considered the machines equal. Just those two points.

 

The importance of HDD or memory or anything else, like the usability of the OS and availability of practical applications that worked to my satisfaction, were utterly and totally not considered. Had I done that I may have gone with ST.

[+save2600]

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

Absolutely was a lot of disk swapping. As a green teen I didn't understand why the industry couldn't do something about it! I remember having to boot the main OS/Workbench, then load PhotonPaint, if I wanted to draw something.. That was 2 swaps right there. And more if I wanted to save my work. Not counting any "in-program" swaps if parts of a library were needed.

Pfffft! You're such a drama queen when it comes to the Amiga.

 

Before a circle jerk of Amiga "users" chime in that didn't know how to use their computers BITD start to wank each other off... 

 

I too was a "green teen" back then (maybe not exactly... owned a TI-99/4A, Atari 400, Apple ][+ and a C64 beforehand), but knew enough to know that it wasn't up to "the industry" to do something about disk swapping on a personal computer like the Commodore Amiga. A 1MB Amiga and two disk drives was more than than competent and pretty damned powerful all told for the time. 

 

This is back when most people who dared to own a computer, knew the ins and outs of computers - the basics anyway. And if they didn't, they sure as shit went out of their way to learn, even if "accidentally" by way of the included documentation that ALL Amiga's included! Basically, if you didn't know how to setup a RAM: disk to assign common Workbench commands to it back in the 80's (yes, even a typical 1MB system) or even create yourself a slim/trim Workbench environment on a single 880kb floppy for those with single drive systems... well, again... PFFFFFT!  

[zzip]

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

Absolutely was a lot of disk swapping. As a green teen I didn't understand why the industry couldn't do something about it! I remember having to boot the main OS/Workbench, then load PhotonPaint, if I wanted to draw something.. That was 2 swaps right there. And more if I wanted to save my work. Not counting any "in-program" swaps if parts of a library were needed.

 

Forget the much-vaunted multitasking capabilities. You'd have to "manually manage" all the disk i/o, swap'n'swap'n'swap! And more swap! Like the whole context needed to be changed out to do something else. Made worse by 512K or 1MB RAM. Hated it! Out of the box multitasking was limited to having a clock and calculator and maybe 1 other program going.

Yeah I remember basic disk I/O operations required too much swapping.   I couldn't even wrap my head around multitasking.   It was much touted in the magazines.  But the original Amiga had 256K, I think?  And you had to load the OS into that.   And you can run any two applications you want at the same time?  How??    So in practice (clock / calculator) doesn't sound like it was much different from Atari ST's Desk Accessory system.   But I was always told desk accessories didn't count as 'real' multitasking even though they could run simultaneously with your main program.

 

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

Just remembered when I was going back and forth about getting an Amiga or ST.. The Amiga won over the ST simply because the amount of simultaneous colors onscreen was greater, and Amiga had something called a blitter. Otherwise I considered the machines equal. Just those two points.

I definitely wanted the graphics/sound capabilites of the Amiga,  but it came down to cost.   I think an Amiga system was twice as much.   Actually what it came down to was when Atari released the STfm models meaning I could use a TV as a color monitor and so I bought the monochrome monitor for productivity, meaning about $500 for a complete ST system.   This was probably shortly before the Amiga 500 came out, or at least before I knew about it because that may have changed things.

[+save2600]

20 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah I remember basic disk I/O operations required too much swapping.   I couldn't even wrap my head around multitasking.

Keep 'em coming boys, the Amiga hater-train is just taking off. All-a-bored!   (purposely misspelled for the all important pun)

[Keatah]

On 9/12/2022 at 2:42 PM, glazball said:

No idea how I would even begin to look at it to see if the data is still there.

You'd likely need to hook it to an old motherboard with real PATA connectors. A USB to PATA adapter cable usually won't work, doesn't support the correct command set used by the early drives. That's all assuming it's an early IDE drive. Would need a model number to tell U more.

[Keatah]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

But I was always told desk accessories didn't count as 'real' multitasking even though they could run simultaneously with your main program.

Some unix jerk tell'ya that?

 

Multi-Tasking can be vague. Nebulous terms like "real" don't really say much - they rather define usefulness to someone. Solidifies and brongs to the forefront an opinion. Nothing more.

 

Shit, by those standards, A2 was multitasking in that it read the joystick port, generated sound, and drew graphics on the screen. That's multitasking right there! And all of it comes together as a game. And it is very "real" to me.

 

Doing wordprocessing, downloading, printing, and updating and zipping files, all at once is just more of the same old shit. That's multitasking right there. And all of it comes together as a typical ass-sitting session. And it is very "real" to me.

 

Only difference between those two scenarios is the amount of context switching and the apparent complexity of the "task". To the computer is an unending stream of bits.