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Modern drive solution for a 286

don't have a single 720k floppy to my name haha. those cables would allow me to hook both drives up at once? If so then I'll just upgrade the deskpro with both drive types permanently. Any idea where I could find a bracket to fit the 3.5" drive into a 5.25" drive bay? I've got one open.
 
You can have both a 5.25" and 3.5" drive together on one cable, but the total limit is still two drives. So if you have two 5.25" drives now you would lose one.

Lots of adapters on ebay and amazon. You've got the standard plastic, slightly better plastic, and metal/plastic.

In a pinch you can put tape over the HD hole to use the disk as DD, but it's probably not reliable long term.
 
You can either construct a cable yourself with both edge- and pin header connectors or crimp an IDC connector onto an existing cable. There are also "hybrid" floppy cables with both types of connectors at all positions. There are also adapters that connect to an pin male header (like 3.5" drives) and end in a male edge connector.

3.5" to 5.25" conversion kits used to come with both the power cable adapter and the ping-edge adapters. Don't know whatever happened to those.

Lots of solutions.
 
Thanks for the links everyone. Gotta see what my BIOS supports first. It should be a 1989 BIOS revision, that’s when mine was made.
 
What about a Gotek? Heard they’re good for floppy drive replacements and if I did then that would solve the software transfer issue instead of relying on old disks. Then I could worry about getting it set up with a hard drive. I could replace the tape backup drive I can’t even use with one.
 
well... because using the old hardware is part of the fun? I have a bunch of vintage PowerBook laptops. To transfer software to them, I use an external SCSI device called a PiSCSI. It uses a Raspberry Pi 3B with a special GPIO board to emulate an external SCSI device. The Pi is more powerful than the PowerBook, so why not just run Mini vMac or similar on the Pi instead? Because it's part of the fun of it all, and you still get the vintage hardware experience. To each his own though.

Using a Gotek would also mean cutting out the "bridge machine train" which is why I got the PiSCSI for my PowerBooks in the first place. Before that, it would take 3 laptops and 15 minutes to get just one program moved over on vintage mac formatted floppies. And if the floppy drive in one of them was broken, I had no options.
 
Funny--I used to use Laplink for the same thing. Nowadays I use a LAN.
Part of the vintage experience, it seems to me, is experiencing the warts as well as the high points.
It's your choice, of course.
 
Yeah I've got to get a LapLink cable for my laptops. Will definitely come in handy.

As for the whole "purely vintage" stuff, in an ideal world I'd have a big network of vintage PC systems that can all network together and stay "pure" with no modern hardware involved. But the issue is that I don't, and getting that set up is really expensive. As for spinning rust, I certainly do love it. Most of my PowerBooks are running their original SCSI drives and it certainly adds to the experience, but thing is, they die! 30 year old drives are dropping like flies and if your 20MB IDE drive kicks it like mine did, a replacement that will probably also die in a couple years will cost you $100. Versus $50 or more for a modern solution that will keep the vintage hardware running for the next 3 decades. We can all wish that someone would manufacture new noisy low capacity hard drives for these computers, but that's unlikely to happen. If I do run into a working drive I usually leave it if it's in a 90s system, unless I need the extra storage of an SSD.
Starting around the XP era I want to get everything SSD swapped because those drives are quiet anyway, and there's a big speed gain to be had. Eventually all of my systems are going to need them to stay running, old drives die.
 
I don't have any Goteks but a lot of people like them. Remember though that it still looks like a floppy drive to the host system. So you can't just dump 100 MB of random files on a USB stick. They have to be in properly formatted disk images that the Gotek can mount.
 
3lectr1c said:
you still get the vintage hardware experience.
Click to expand...

maxtherabbit said:
not without spinning rust you don't
Click to expand...
I guess it's a matter of perspective. I think you can get a "vintage hardware experience" without a spinning hard drive. When I got started the media was cassette tapes and when I got a PC it was with two 720k floppies. I did not do computing with a hard drive back then. Now, when I put in a CF card in my 286 I feel a quite authentic experience. I can load a lot of software without worrying about reading and writing floppies. I don't need the spinning hard drive sound to make it feel real to me.

Seaken
 
3lectr1c said:
Yeah I've got to get a LapLink cable for my laptops. Will definitely come in handy.

As for the whole "purely vintage" stuff, in an ideal world I'd have a big network of vintage PC systems that can all network together and stay "pure" with no modern hardware involved. But the issue is that I don't, and getting that set up is really expensive. As for spinning rust, I certainly do love it. Most of my PowerBooks are running their original SCSI drives and it certainly adds to the experience, but thing is, they die! 30 year old drives are dropping like flies and if your 20MB IDE drive kicks it like mine did, a replacement that will probably also die in a couple years will cost you $100. Versus $50 or more for a modern solution that will keep the vintage hardware running for the next 3 decades. We can all wish that someone would manufacture new noisy low capacity hard drives for these computers, but that's unlikely to happen. If I do run into a working drive I usually leave it if it's in a 90s system, unless I need the extra storage of an SSD.
Starting around the XP era I want to get everything SSD swapped because those drives are quiet anyway, and there's a big speed gain to be had. Eventually all of my systems are going to need them to stay running, old drives die.
Click to expand...
One replacement for early IDE drives is the Disk On Module. It's a solid state drive that's been designed to work as an IDE drive. Just plug it directly into an IDE port. A 504Mb module runs less than $20 on eBay.
 
Brings up the same issue about drive type select I’d imagine. I have a list of drive types saved somewhere on my computer, I’ll check later what my BIOS supports.
 
3lectr1c said:
don't have a single 720k floppy to my name haha.
Click to expand...
You can use a 1.44 MB drive as a 720 KB drive.
Also, 1.44 MB floppies can be used instead of 720 KB floppies (just tape over the hole), although they may not be long-term stable.

Note that 800 KB (Apple) or 880 KB (Amiga) disks are identical to 720 KB (PC) disks. The difference is in the format, not in physics.
 
good to know about the drive. from what i've heard, you can use the tape method pretty reliably to format high density disks as 720k, 800k mac, etc. but they will only work on HD drives. I've had to use this trick on my Mac systems to write 800k disk images to 1.4MB floppies.
 
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