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What is the smallest PATA drive that you own?

simie said:
I remember that because the Microdrive were expensive and photographer wanted them they were buying iPods and stripping them out because Apple's iPod were cheap at the time.
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Correct, yet on the other hand Microdrives were cheap as chips compared to flash memory at the time 🙂
 
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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
 
laptech said:
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
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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.
 
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.
 
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simie said:
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.
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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.
 
simie said:
I remember that when I had Windows 3.11 you could compress the drive to double the data and it worked quite well.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
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.
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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.
 
5.25inchmfmharddiskdrive.jpg

I use to own one of these beasts and I used it as a door stop. I cannot remember how small it actually was.
 
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simie said:
5.25inchmfmharddiskdrive.jpg

I use to own one of these beasts and I used it as a door stop. I cannot remember how small it actually was.
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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. 😳
 
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AphoticD said:
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. 😳
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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.
 
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LightBulbFun said:
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

View attachment 2151712

(it does work/have DOS on it, but the CMOS settings have cleared out and I dont have a setup disk for it currently!)
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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
 
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LightBulbFun said:
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

View attachment 2151712

(it does work/have DOS on it, but the CMOS settings have cleared out and I dont have a setup disk for it currently!)
Click to expand...
What was it an Intel 8086 or earlier cpu?
 
LightBulbFun said:
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

View attachment 2151712

(it does work/have DOS on it, but the CMOS settings have cleared out and I dont have a setup disk for it currently!)
Click to expand...
Nice! Somehow that picture could be a screenshot from a new Fallout game. 🙂
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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Here is a little io card that I picked up some years ago from Maplin Electronics. It converts Pata to Sata​

card.jpg
 
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.
 
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