Correct, yet on the other hand Microdrives were cheap as chips compared to flash memory at the time
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
What is the smallest PATA drive that you own?
- Thread starter simie
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
This thread got me looking at the ide drive that I recently removed from my old Compaq LTE5300 because the drive decided to give up and I replaced it with a CF. Must admit I had a 'wow' look on my face because I did not realize the hard drive was so small. It's a actually 1.3GB and yes it's a laptop size 2.5inch hard drive. It's a Toshiba MK1302MAN.
It's a Windows 3.1 machine, I have other low GB drives but they came from Win 98 and XP laptops which range from 20GB to 40GB, but never did I think I'd have one THAT low (1.3GB) lol
It's a Windows 3.1 machine, I have other low GB drives but they came from Win 98 and XP laptops which range from 20GB to 40GB, but never did I think I'd have one THAT low (1.3GB) lol
It fun when you have something so small and you try to put everything back on it, I know you said that yours is broken. I remember that when I had Windows 3.11 you could compress the drive to double the data and it worked quite well.
A 6gb drive from my tangerine iBook G3 that's loud as ****. Replaced it with a CF-card + adapter (with the help of this forum) last summer. Now that iBook is silent like a new M1 laptop.
Yes! Fun thread idea.
Two of my iBook G3 Blueberries had working 3.2GB drives, both very noisy. I pulled one and replaced it with a 32GB mSATA SSD some years ago, then repurposed the HDD by putting it to work in a headless iBook G4 “Pancake Mac”, with a complete OS X Tiger installation (space saving help from Monolingual) and a host of useful apps and services.
The smallest, functional PATA drive in my arsenal is a 1.3GB HDD for the PowerBook 1400cs/166, but I typically boot Mac OS 8.6 via a 2GB CF card on this and spin down the HDD.
Two of my iBook G3 Blueberries had working 3.2GB drives, both very noisy. I pulled one and replaced it with a 32GB mSATA SSD some years ago, then repurposed the HDD by putting it to work in a headless iBook G4 “Pancake Mac”, with a complete OS X Tiger installation (space saving help from Monolingual) and a host of useful apps and services.
The smallest, functional PATA drive in my arsenal is a 1.3GB HDD for the PowerBook 1400cs/166, but I typically boot Mac OS 8.6 via a 2GB CF card on this and spin down the HDD.
The annoying thing is it worked 3 years ago. I used to every so often power it up and play around with Win 3.1 and then put in storage (bottom of my clothes closet) and when I saw this thread I got it out again, fired it up and it didn't work. Bios see's the drive just fine, turns out that there is just far to many bad sectors on it that DOS install could not get around when trying to format the drive ready for DOS 6.22 to be installed on it. Hence why I moved to using CF.
You can do this in Win9x as well, and in Win2k and later versions. The way it was done in DOS/3.x/9x was not-very-peace-of-mindish: the compressed “drive” was stored as an image on the actual drive. If anything happened to that image… And it slowed disk access, making slow systems even slower.
Last edited:
I kinder liked win2k. Widows XP, brilliant for fast PC's. You did a fresh installation of the OS and loaded all your drivers and all three service packs and any security update and rebooted your PC and my GOD it now crawls.
I use to own one of these beasts and I used it as a door stop. I cannot remember how small it actually was.
What a whopper!
I use to own one of these beasts and I used it as a door stop. I cannot remember how small it actually was.
The closest I would have gotten to this would have been the 5.25” Quantum Bigfoot circa 1998 in my girlfriend’s Windoze PC. Maybe 2 or 4GB.
I remember opening up the tower to inspect the hardware and was like .. “whoa... that’s a surprisingly big hard drive” haha.
I never ever did anything with it, so it became a door stop until I banged my toes on it then I do not know what happened to it.What a whopper!
The closest I would have gotten to this would have been the 5.25” Quantum Bigfoot circa 1998 in my girlfriend’s Windoze PC. Maybe 2 or 4GB.
I remember opening up the tower to inspect the hardware and was like .. “whoa... that’s a surprisingly big hard drive” haha.
smallest PATA drive I have? has to be the drive 20MB drive in my Compaq Portable II, which is actually an MFM drive that connects via an ATA-MFM bridge-board, so not sure it counts LOL
(it does work/have DOS on it, but the CMOS settings have cleared out and I dont have a setup disk for it currently!)
(it does work/have DOS on it, but the CMOS settings have cleared out and I dont have a setup disk for it currently!)
At least you have the good fortune of still having the original drive working. most of us have had to shed a tear of goodbye to our once working original drives now gone to the great HDD god in the sky
Can I be a bit cheeky here? bit grubby on the front plastic isn't? hehe
Nice! Somehow that picture could be a screenshot from a new Fallout game.
Nice! Somehow that picture could be a screenshot from a new Fallout game.
well I have this lamp in my collection which has been said to look something like a glowing nuclear fuel rod
It is funny you obtain something and struggle to get the drivers for it and end up getting rid of it then years later you find the drivers for it. In my case it was a Summer-graphics tablet.
I have a hard drive somewhere that I am going to post which I am not sure where it was used, probably industrial. I will post it later.
I have a hard drive somewhere that I am going to post which I am not sure where it was used, probably industrial. I will post it later.
Last edited:
I have three or four i486 laptops with 40MB PATA drives inside. I think I have a German no-name i386 notebook with a small black Connor 20MB drive inside but I'll need to check on that. Also have a Toshiba i286 with a 20MB drive inside. That might be a 40MB limited by the BIOS to only see 20MB, though. Other similar small(er) drives I have are either SCSI (Apple) or ESDI (IBM), so they don't count for the purposes of this thread.
Speaking of PATA drives, have we seen this?
I think I have a 1GB IDE HDD in something.
And I have the Microdrive that was in my iPod Mini if that counts lol
And I have the Microdrive that was in my iPod Mini if that counts lol
It's a PATA hard drive so yep. But then, does my 8 MB CompactFlash card count? It's not a hard drive...
Seagate 2,5" 40 MB Hardisk, Prize 700 German Marks in around 1992. It was for my Amiga 600
Correction: I think it was a 3,5" drive, because i have made a crew hole to fix it inside the case.
Correction: I think it was a 3,5" drive, because i have made a crew hole to fix it inside the case.
Last edited: