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#31
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Large drive support
On Sat, 12 Sep 2015 12:58:47 -0500, Sam E wrote:
On 09/11/2015 08:38 PM, pjp wrote: [snip] Drag is I still have 50+ 100Mb zip drives and a whole stack of tape. I still even have a SCSI cable and PCI card for the tape drive and one of the zip drives. Kept it because cable has seven connectors on it (believe that's scsi limit) Actually 8, but one of those (IIRC #7) is the controller card itself. SCSI (Narrow) allows a max of 8 devices (0-7). The controller (HBA) SCSI address normally defaults to #7 but can usually be reconfigured to *any* address. Using #7 for the HBA is purely by convention but since there's no compelling reason to set it otherwise, that convention is effectively a de-facto standard, along with other conventions which have done likewise such as the bootable SCSI device support being limited to the #0 and #1 device addresses (eg an HDD and a CDROM) with most HBAs that feature a boot bios rom. I still have a DDS tape drive with an Adaptec PCI HBA that I must have acquired 'cheap' at a computer fair a year or three before the current millenium. I set it up in an old refurbished P2/350 (o/c'd to 467MHz) PC blessed with an Intel BX440 chipset (hence it running rings around the crappy 1GHz skt370 P3s mounted in VIA chipset MoBos) some 6 to 9 months ago to give it its first outing in over 12 years of it being left to gather dust atop a storage cabinet. Remarkably, it still works as good as the day I shelled out 200 quid on the drive alone. The hardest part of this resurrection job was in tracking down the backup software and figuring that I had to stick with win95OSR2 (or it might have been win2k except I don't think the backup software was compatible, hence win95). I have a collection of 1.3, 2.0 and 4.0 GB (uncompressed) DDS tape carts which I was interested in checking out. I was going to process every single one (about half of almost 120 tape carts in all) to transfer them to HDD archival storage media (a 1GB SATA drive retired from the NAS box many years ago now). I say *was* but got fed up with this planned exercise fairly early on since it was obvious that this backup data was exactly that, just backups of data that still survives on hard drives despite the many generations of HDD upgrades these data sets have lived through. There just might be a few dozen/hundred MBs worth of unique data in that backup tape collection that didn't survive the HDD upgrade transitions which might be of some historical interest to me alone. If that's the case, I suspect their only worth will lay in the 'finger pointing' laugh out loud bemusement at some pathetic software or user data that's long past its BB date with no practical utility whatsoever, hence the rapid loss of interest in 'My New Pet Project'(MNPP). The only satisfaction I got out of MNPP was that of seeing the tape drive and backup software working once more despite its 12 or so years of dust gathering. -- Johnny B Good |
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#32
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Large drive support
On 2015-09-12 2:08 PM, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 09/12/2015 08:18 AM, A.M wrote: [snip] I had the same size as my first. It was inside of an IBM PS/1 on which I learned all of the basics of a PC. I hated that it wasn't upgradeable in any reasonable way though. It also didn't take long before 30MB was replaced by 120MB, then 540MB and so on. 30MB wasn't huge for very long. I remember when 540MB was common. At the time I had 420MB. I wondered what people were doing about the 504MB limit. BTW, I was reminded of those disk limits when I got an old PC recently. It won't accept a drive larger than 8.4GB (16 times 504MB). I was a teenager at the time. My dad bought me a 286-10 with 30MB hard disk in 1991, I ended up killing it in 1993 and therefore used the computer without hard disk for the next eight months. My friend actually gave me a 130MB HD to use but this was an IBM PS/1 which didn't use normal HD connections. With whatever small amount of funds I got for my birthday in 1994, I managed to buy a 386-16 with 40MB HD which I used until 1996. It didn't take long before the 40MB felt really small and by 1996 especially, my hardware was incredibly outdated. Luckily, it turned out that I had the highest mathematics grade in my city and I ended up getting a $300 "scholarship" which I used to buy a 540MB HD. My hardware was still awful, but at least I had some space. I kept that thing until 1999 when I got my first job. After that, computing became a lot less exciting because I could suddenly afford pretty much any upgrade. It felt good to have a decent machine but I had to admit that I had a lot of fun figuring out nifty ways of getting things done on outdated hardware. I miss the 90s. -- A.M |
#33
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Large drive support
On 09/12/2015 01:14 PM, BugHunter wrote:
Mark Lloyd schreef op Za 12 Sep 2015 om 13:08: On 09/12/2015 08:18 AM, A.M wrote: [snip] I had the same size as my first. It was inside of an IBM PS/1 on which I learned all of the basics of a PC. I hated that it wasn't upgradeable in any reasonable way though. It also didn't take long before 30MB was replaced by 120MB, then 540MB and so on. 30MB wasn't huge for very long. I remember when 540MB was common. At the time I had 420MB. I wondered what people were doing about the 504MB limit. BTW, I was reminded of those disk limits when I got an old PC recently. It won't accept a drive larger than 8.4GB (16 times 504MB). I bought a 540 MB drive, there was a floppy with it with a kind of extender program, so I could use the full 540 MB. So BIOS would recognize it enough to boot? Maybe it was like the 32GB limit, where early drives that exceeded it (I had a 40GB) had a jumper to limit it to 32GB for the BIOS and a program to recognize the real size. -- 103 days until the winter celebration (Friday December 25, 2015 12:00:00 AM for 1 day). Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "Every one who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years. Criminal Code of Canada sec. 296(1) So, arrest me!" |
#34
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Large drive support
On 09/12/2015 02:09 PM, Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
[snip] I still have a Syquest 230MB drive (maybe even two: one SCSI and one parallel-port) and a few cartridges, but I haven't tried using them for years. Perce I actually had two of those drives. They were the same except for the interface. One used IDE and the other SCSI. I later had one of the 1.5GB drives (Syjet?). -- 103 days until the winter celebration (Friday December 25, 2015 12:00:00 AM for 1 day). Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ |
#35
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Large drive support
Mark Lloyd schreef op Zo 13 Sep 2015 om 14:12:
On 09/12/2015 01:14 PM, BugHunter wrote: Mark Lloyd schreef op Za 12 Sep 2015 om 13:08: On 09/12/2015 08:18 AM, A.M wrote: [snip] I had the same size as my first. It was inside of an IBM PS/1 on which I learned all of the basics of a PC. I hated that it wasn't upgradeable in any reasonable way though. It also didn't take long before 30MB was replaced by 120MB, then 540MB and so on. 30MB wasn't huge for very long. I remember when 540MB was common. At the time I had 420MB. I wondered what people were doing about the 504MB limit. BTW, I was reminded of those disk limits when I got an old PC recently. It won't accept a drive larger than 8.4GB (16 times 504MB). I bought a 540 MB drive, there was a floppy with it with a kind of extender program, so I could use the full 540 MB. So BIOS would recognize it enough to boot? Maybe it was like the 32GB limit, where early drives that exceeded it (I had a 40GB) had a jumper to limit it to 32GB for the BIOS and a program to recognize the real size. The conversion happened during the boot, If I booted from a floppy, I saw the real disk contents but only 512 MB, and otherwise I saw the 540 MB contents and an other MBR. -- ____________________________________________ Bye, BugHunter. |
#36
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Large drive support
On 09/13/2015 02:15 PM, BugHunter wrote:
[snip] The conversion happened during the boot, If I booted from a floppy, I saw the real disk contents but only 512 MB, and otherwise I saw the 540 MB contents and an other MBR. So it appeared to be 2 drives? I think that had been done recently to get around the 2TB limit. -- 102 days until the winter celebration (Friday December 25, 2015 12:00:00 AM for 1 day). Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate." [F. M. Knowles] |
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