Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
The 5150, as sold by IBM, came in many varieties, but none of those varieties included a Hard Disk (Fixed Disk) drive. The official reason was that the power supply inside the PC was not powerful enough to support running a hard disk drive. In those days of full-height 5.25" floppy and hard drives, that can be understood.
It should come to no surprise that a user can use any mass storage device inside a PC if the power requirements of the drive and interface are within the power supply's limits. Newer, lower power drives may work with the 63.5W of the PC's power supply. More common was to upgrade the power supply to a higher rated unit, such as the one in the IBM PC/XT (130W, which is what I am using.)
IBM did support using hard drives in a 5150, through their 5161 Expansion Unit. For most users, this was a huge investment and by the time it became affordable, more powerful computers with hard drives were on the market for the same amount of money. Most users of the 5150 back in the day probably never used a hard disk.
A stock 5150 probably has no room for a hard disk drive, filled with floppy disk drives, except by using a hard card. I do not know whether it ever came with DOS greater than 2.1, which only supports disk drives up to 16MB. As a friend of mine said when I presented to him my PC with an XT hard disk drive and power supply, "Its really an XT."
It should come to no surprise that a user can use any mass storage device inside a PC if the power requirements of the drive and interface are within the power supply's limits. Newer, lower power drives may work with the 63.5W of the PC's power supply. More common was to upgrade the power supply to a higher rated unit, such as the one in the IBM PC/XT (130W, which is what I am using.)
IBM did support using hard drives in a 5150, through their 5161 Expansion Unit. For most users, this was a huge investment and by the time it became affordable, more powerful computers with hard drives were on the market for the same amount of money. Most users of the 5150 back in the day probably never used a hard disk.
A stock 5150 probably has no room for a hard disk drive, filled with floppy disk drives, except by using a hard card. I do not know whether it ever came with DOS greater than 2.1, which only supports disk drives up to 16MB. As a friend of mine said when I presented to him my PC with an XT hard disk drive and power supply, "Its really an XT."