With a bit of luck I will receive a model 30 286 tomorrow. It does have an HDD but I don't know which one. According Wikipedia it can be as big as 40 MB and it will be an ESDI type.
My question: is it possible to replace the original disk with or install a larger IDE HDD or CF card?
Thank you very much in advance?
So having a 30-286 for our first computer, I learned all sorts of things about it.
First, the drive is not standard for the time--ours was the 30MB Seagate ST138L I believe. It wasn't the 138A (IDE) or the 138N (SCSI), and it had a large edge card connector on it. We never tried to upgrade this drive as it was terribly cost prohibitive and rare.
So what we discovered was hard cards. Because the the 30-286 was NOT microchannel and still used ISA slots, we could just one of these. But back in the day the Plus hardcards were really expensive.
So we found a company that kinda made their own using a large metal bracket to hold a drive and a host interface card--in our case the Seagate ST-01 SCSI card with a Quantum 200-something MB SCSI hard drive. Because the ST-01 didn't have a bios, it didn't try to be the boot drive, and aside from pressing F1 initially because the configuration changed and then using the system disk to record that change, that was it--the drive worked! We actually installed windows on that new D: drive and left the original 30MB as our boot drive. Later on our 486 had the same arrangement as the 157N drive we used didn't have a way to adjust the SCSI ID so it had to be boot.
And now just writing all this out and wondering where did we get that 50MB ST-157N from, it dawned on me that the 157N was originally installed on that hard card and we upgraded it to the Quantum drive for more storage and because that was a cheaper way to get the storage vs paying for a 200MB+ drive on the card. We also thought that we might be able to swap the boards from the 138L and the 157N and got as far as unscrewing it from the 138L, but couldn't get past moving the board past the spindle so we gave up. Wow, can't believe all this came back...
If I had to do the same thing today and if our original drive was dead (which it sadly may be anyways), I would simply forgo the stock drive, use a scsi card and put a scsi drive in place of where the original one was. But to make it boot you may need the ST-02 because it came with a BIOS to enable booting, and I think now I recall us having one of those too and also putting the 02 BIOS in the 01 and then the card did boot with the factory drive secondary.
If you don't care about being period correct, you could use a sd/cf card to ide to isa solution.
Anyways, hope this helps in your quest to upgrade the drive!
