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Storage Devices

Hard Drives

The first PC I owned was an early IBM PC which I purchased second hand in 1987 for £100. It had dual drive and no hard disk. These were the days of DOS 3.1 and programs running under the DOS system were not any way near as memory hungry as the Windows programs of today. Within a year I had purchased and fitted a 20M hard drive which cost me £95 in a computer sale. The system was now well within the capabilities of the DOS software available at the time.

My favorite software package was Ashton-Tate's First framework, an inter grated package which could be loaded onto the machine using either the twin drives or by installing onto the 20M hard drive. I tended to use the 360K 5.5 inch floppy drive to load the program to conserve space on the hard drive for data.

As I have stated previously, in 1990 I purchased a mini tower, 286 16Mhz system. The hard drive on that machine was 40M, this being recommended specification of the time. How things have changed since then.

Over the last few years there has been a growing pressure on PC owners to put more space on their machine to satisfy the hunger of newer applications. In fact this trend has had a greater effect on users than increase in computer power.

In 1994 I fitted a 410M IDE hard-drive to my them 386 machine, mistakenly, I thought the drive would last me for a few more years. But, along came Windows 95 in August 1996, and then huge memory hungry programs that use it. Once again my hard drive seems inadequate, even after using Windows 95's disk compression software to increase disk space. This is another area where the size of the device is increasing rapidly, as the price 'goes through the floor'. Now you can purchase a 2.1GB EIDE hard drive for about £70 and 3.2 GB versions for £110. For about £130 you can get a 6.4GB EIDE hard drive.

To use the early hard-disk drives, a 'drive card' was fitted in one of the expansion slot, which contained all the electronics needed to run the drive. The whole set-up tended to be very expensive. The IDE drive 'intergrated' the electronics of the board on the drive creating a standard of cheaper hard drives.

Most entry level hard-drives tend to be of the IDE(Intergrated Drive Electronics) type up to 500Mb or the Extended version (EIDE) up to 5.1Gb(priced at about £300).
Whereas the IDE drive system is suited mainly to only two drives per system. An EIDE drive system has the advantage over the IDE drive in allowing the following:

• Drive capacities over 528Mb.
• More than two drives per system can be accommodated.
• Other drives, including Tape, CD-ROM and Removable drive can be used.
• Faster transfer rates.

Hard drives need a controller card. An EIDE card being the better option in that it will allow you to run either an IDE or EIDE hard drive. The controller board is fitted for either a VESA, or ISA expansion slot. The controller card will allow you to run, for example, 2, or 4 hard drives,2 floppy drives and a CD-ROM. The board should also have serial and/or parallel sockets.

If you need up to 8 devices fitted you could consider using a SCSI drive and SCSI controller, allowing you to daisy chain together a number of different SCSI devices(up to eight devices which can be hard drives-to-tape drives-to-scanners etc.).

Floppy and Portable Drives
CD-ROM Drives