It's been over a year now since my trusty Deskpro 286's hard drive died. I want to get it going again soon, but upon researching the XT-IDE, it seems that it will run quite slowly comparatively to the speed of the 12MHz 286 with 16 bit ISA slots available. What are my options here for a solid state drive solution that will take advantage of that glorious 16-bit performance?
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Modern drive solution for a 286
- Thread starter 3lectr1c
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Chuck(G)
25k Member
An old 16-bit ISA IDE card should be optimum. Hook it to spinning rust or a CF adapter. 16 bit transfers--short of a cacheing controller, it's as good as it gets on a 286 system.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Have you considered a DDO; do you have a card with an unpopulated socket? (i.e. network card with a boot ROM socket).
rmay635703
Veteran Member
If you can find an old gsi ide/quad floppy controller you can then use 4x 2.88mb floppies and up to 8gb drives.
Some scsi controllers are nice if your expectations are moderated
Some scsi controllers are nice if your expectations are moderated
What I'm gathering here is that there's no good modern solution for this, like a newly made card? I'd honestly be surprised if that wasn't the case. Pretty large userbase if someone did make one.
And thank you all for the ideas, I'll look into them but it honestly sounds like the options are more limited then I'd expect. Stuff like this exists for vintage macintosh stuff, and I'd imagine that way more people collect PC.
And thank you all for the ideas, I'll look into them but it honestly sounds like the options are more limited then I'd expect. Stuff like this exists for vintage macintosh stuff, and I'd imagine that way more people collect PC.
The suggestion to use CompactFlash is because through an adapter it is IDE-compatible. That is probably why, as you said earlier, you haven't seen an effort to create a custom solutions for PCs. CompactFlash is good enough. An ISA SATA card would be neat, but far beyond my capabilities for sure.
The suggestion for a network card is not because of anything inherent about hooking it up to a network, but because it's a convenient way to add a ROM chip to add extensions to your system's BIOS at boot. This is only needed if you aren't happy with a software solution (disk overlay) like Chuck(G) suggested. With an overlay, you pick any hard drive type in your BIOS that's anywhere close, and a loader that gets installed in the first few sectors of the disk takes over at boot and replaces the BIOS's own code for accessing IDE drives. So it is a full software solution with no hardware changes needed.
Ah, DDO meants disk overlay? Didn't know that so wasn't sure what chuck meant, sorry. That does sound like a rather decent solution, in that case I could find any old low capacity IDE drive and just use that. That way I've got a decent amount of storage (300-500MB hopefully) and HDD sounds. How would I install such a tool though? I've currently got no way of getting files on and off of it (part of what I hoped a CF card solution would solve). I get that CF is possible, but I was thinking of something along the lines of a card you could buy (modern production) that will already have XTIDE BIOS loaded to it, like the 8 bit stuff that's out there for XT systems. Seems like a catch-22. Can't get a drive working without that software plugin, can't get the software plugin without a drive working. Unfortunately I don't own a bridge machine with both size floppy drives, and the Deskpro has 5.25" only.
Plasma
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You don't need a special card for 16-bit IDE, that's why it doesn't exist. Any ISA card with IDE will work. You can put the IDE BIOS (XUB, Promise DriveMAX, etc) in anything that is mapped to memory. This is often a NIC (network card), but could also be a dedicated ROM card.
I would personally just temporarily move the 5 1/4" floppy drive to another system and then write the disk image or whatever needs to go onto disks from there, in order to bootstrap it.
Otherwise you're going to be trying to use a VM or other means to install to the HDD or CF card with the exact right (or wrong, rather) disk geometry that the Deskpro expects.
That makes sense to me. Would the ROM card you linked bottleneck performance on a 16-bit system? Doubt it since it's the IDE card that's doing the heavy lifting, but I just want to make sure. What type of ROM chip would I have to get to install the XTIDE BIOS on the ROM card or a NIC? I don't have a programmer as well and I'm not too eager to spend a bunch of money getting one just to get a drive in my 286.
I'd also need to take the controller board with me. My only other system I could use for this would be my Compaq Presario 4660 from circa 1998, and it's a mini little tower that isn't exactly well suited for that task. I've also tried that controller card in that system before when trying to read the Deskpro's drive on a more modern system, and it either locked up the Presario or took priority over the motherboard IDE and prevented it from booting from its internal drive.
That little Compaq is my only other desktop with ISA. I've got to get a good 486 desktop at some point to bridge the gap.
Baby AT Pentium boards should be new enough to have all onboard i/o such that all you need is a PCI video card (easy to find) and therefore might be a bit easier to piece together than a 486, yet old enough that the onboard floppy controller still supports dual drives. As if you need an excuse to build another old PC :D
Hmm.... I think I'd rather wait and find a nice 486. Era of system I really would like to have and I'm probably going to the swap meet in june anyway where there might be one. I've survived this long without the deskpro, I can go a while longer. Oh and then there's the rusted out 5170 I need to give a go at reviving.
Plasma
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It is true that the IDE BIOS access will be 8-bit, but this is also the case on 16-bit cards unless they have two chips (even/odd). I've never seen an ISA IDE controller with two EPROMs so I guess the performance impact is not significant. If your system BIOS has ROM shadowing, you could enable that for 16-bit access. Although that wasn't a common feature until the 386 era.
If you are looking for something ready to go, this is an option. It's already programmed with XUB set up for 16-bit access with the primary IDE channel. Both ROM cards I linked have EEPROMs, so you don't need a separate programmer.
As others have mentioned, DDO is also an option and is free. Just a bit annoying to setup. You could temporarily put a 3.5" floppy in your Deskpro and use a USB floppy drive on a modern PC to move files between them.
5.25" Floppies yes, but it's MFM style (I know it isn't exactly the same as MFM) edge connector, not the pins that 3.5" drives use.
Edit: The connector actually is the same at the controller! Issue is I can't connect both drives at once which I need to do. Clock battery is removed and it won't boot off anything without being configured first in the floppy disk-based setup, which I'd probably have to do to boot it off a 3.5" high density drive. Don't even think my BIOS supports it. It's extremely primitive, you need the config floppy to change anything.
Edit: The connector actually is the same at the controller! Issue is I can't connect both drives at once which I need to do. Clock battery is removed and it won't boot off anything without being configured first in the floppy disk-based setup, which I'd probably have to do to boot it off a 3.5" high density drive. Don't even think my BIOS supports it. It's extremely primitive, you need the config floppy to change anything.