Ultimate retro hard drive? Seagate SSHD

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[GatorMilk]

You have quickly become one of my favorite youtubers. I am very much so into older Tech, and love making different builds. I didn't know that SSHDs would be good for older machines until now.

My Rig is a AsusZ97A+3.1 Motherboard with a Zotac 760 GPU, Intel 4460 CPU, ADATA 120GB SSD with 2 Seagate external HDDs for storage, all powered by an EVGA 500B. It's housed in a Vivo Case 03-Red. I plan on trading out the 760 for the 1070, or waiting another year for the 1060.

My recent W98/WXP PC uses a HP Pavilion a200n with some spare parts and obscure drivers I found. The GPU, the FX5200, is awful, and I decided to build the Ultimate Dos/98 PC I asked about. I have the parts I would use listed somewhere in my millions of notepad files.

[Gunners_Mate_Guns]

Interesting ideas and conclusions, Phil, but I have to share my personal experience with the Seagate SSHD.
I have been using the 1TB 2.5" (laptop) version for over a year and a half now, and I just received my *THIRD* drive under warranty.
That's right; I've actually had to avail myself of the warranty for this drive on three occasions because I was getting clear symptoms of impending doom for each of the three failed drives.
I'm talking about steadily increasing system hangs, extremely slow or hung boot processes that necessitate repeated reboots to finally get it to come up, declining access times once booted, and finally the program that I use to examine what's going one, GSmartctontrol, indicates multiple unrecoverable errors in the S.M.A.R.T. listings for the drive.
I didn't just give up in each case, but really tried to see if it would clear up before finally sending each of the failing drives in under warranty.
With each of the warranty replaced drives (all clearly marked as "Factory Recertified, " i.e. refurbished), I can immediately notice everything is right back where it should be, with no hangs, no slowing access time, and no S.M.A.R.T. errors...at least for the first two or three months, then I start getting increasingly worse signs of deterioration once again.
It's a damn good thing that I use a drive imaging program (Clonezilla) regularly to back up my drives, because at least restoring after I get the replacement drive is always a snap, but at this rate, I have to wonder if Seagate has totally dropped the ball with this particular drive.
And I say that as someone who has used Seagate drives for twenty years now, with a 500GB 3.5" (desktop version) and a 1.5TB 3.5" that I've used for several years straight with not a sign of trouble from either.
At least Seagate makes good on their warranty every time, and they make the process as easy as possible, but at this point, I have ton wonder if the warranty process is that way because they have so much practice having it used.
Maybe Seagate's seriously bad QC problems are isolated strictly to their 2.5" 1TB SSHD and all their more conventional hard drives and possibly their desktop SSHD and (I doubt it, given my history, but who knows?) probably less possibly their other 2.5" SSHD are also good, but I have no way of knowing for sure.
All I know beyond all doubt is that their 1TB drive intended mainly for laptops is *TERRIBLE*.
Seriously, avoid that thing like the plague, unless you really want to deal with shuttling bad hard drives back to them every few months and possibly lose all your data when it fails before you've had a chance to do a proper backup.

[pavelvrasskii]

SSHD is very expensive. In Russia we can buy for $ 10 any s478 desktop. or s370 for $ 5. Maybe free.
But new SSHD 2TB cost ~100-120$
Very expensive.
I have laptop with pentium (MMX) 133MHz with old bios (8GB lim).
I use 1GB CF-card via cf-to-40pin IDE adapter. Also i can use software Ontrack Disk Manager to limit space of 30, 40, 80GBs harddisks.
In my opinion Ontrack is most flexible such seatools.
Sorry for my bad english and thank you for another great video.

[vertujoe]

your new BGM really gives refreshing watching experience, thanks Phil

[BlackDragon-xnww]

I like the video all the different drive concepts over the years I tackle them one at a time as I run across them you did a impressive work here no small feat thru the power of video edit lol

[Martin-skdf]

I'm going for the Seagate 1TB SSHD on your recommendation. Enough for a 2006 XP machine and way more then enough for a earlier era pc. The Seatools utility is what sold me. So we'll see. Thanks!

[Sonicdude]

I remember this technology. I bought a WD 2TB version for use in an original Xbox. I have the known working SATA to IDE adapter for using SATA drives with the original Xbox and a flashed TSOP that has LBA48 in it to support 2TB drives but it refused to work. Not sure why. Though about using it in a desktop but gave it to my grandma in the end. I may revisit this at some point to see if I can get the Xbox dash to load from the SSD side for faster boot times.

[Imperious]

I would think that 386 and below wouldn't benefit from a SSHD, likely even a modest (133x) CF card will be faster than what the chipset can deliver. I do realise that CF cards have a write limit
to an extent though.

[Synthematix]

SSHD's are the best option for 98, im currently using a 2.5" 500gb toshiba one on my neo2 platinum board and an ssd for xp

[WaybackTECH]

Couple months ago, I picked up a pair of 8GB SSD Sata drives, and I tested one of them with the Micronics Ppro motherboard, and it did auto detect the drive, but only as a 127MB ( i think was the size, it was around that small ) and I tried to manually set the the sectors / heads / cyl in the BIOS for the 8GB size, and it no longer worked. My adapter is pretty much the same as yours, might be exactly the same actually coming from ebay. I have not gone any further yet, and I noticed it would sometimes detect the drive, and others it would not, so there might be another problem also. That is about as old of a motherboard I have tested the SATA to IDE adapter on, and it does support LBA. I also noticed that Sata to IDE adapters do not work with CDROMS, at least that was the case with mine.

[evertcoetzee]

I can definitely see something like this being used in something like a Socket 7 - AMD Athlon XP / P4 build. For older machines, I'd opt for that SD to IDE adapter you used a while back. That's appropriate even for Socket 7 - P3 era machines.

[blakedmcRaveHD]

it's always a joy 2 watch and learn from ur vids! i would love 2 build a ultimate retro gaming build tho! it's hard 2 resist :)

[rdxdt]

Awesome video, i might go with the same sshd later on my P4 Retro Gaming PC

[sergheiadrian]

Ok Phil, my jaw dropped for a few seconds, at 04:50 . You were talking about a SuperSocket 7 motherboard and the video showed you plugging in a SATA cable into a SATA port on a motherboard... For a moment there I thought you had a SS7 MB with SATA connectors.

[Kenny-bwcz]

But can you use the seagate tools on other brands of drives?

[stonent]

They also make a SSHD in 500GB size. I had one in a laptop before. So it may only be in the 2.5" format.

[lightdark]

actually thought of getting an SSHD for my modern machine (it still runs a plain old 5900rpm drive), The main hurdle for using it in retro machine is the price as the drive can cost more than the machine itself in alot of cases. Although I have to admit the idea of an SSHD on a 386 is awesome (or any SATA hard drive, as it will have alot more cache than the system has RAM)

both my PPro and PIII machines use 10k SCSI drives from Quantum and Seagate while the C2D machine uses a Hitachi Ultrastar SATA drive.

hilariously all of these are faster than the 5900rpm drive my modern i5 uses :P

[totalrandomtechnolog]

Hey phill, i have one of those micro SD to IDE adaptors. I might try this on my 486. Have you ever tried sd micro SD to IDE adaptors? Since SD flash memory is so cheap these days, it could be an exellent alternative for old computers.

[luckybob]

I fail to see the reason for this. sub 40gb ssd drives can be bought for a song. It seems a waste to put a 2TB drive and only use 32 or 128gb. Personal experience has shown me it SO much more convenient to have a NAS and put everything there and just boot locally.

[Storm_.]

Phil I have a couple of questions. I have ordered parts to build my voodoo slot 1 p3 system, I'll be using the Asus p2-b 440bx board with a sata to ide adapter as you have used. I would rather not limit the HDD size as I've read that even if the bios doesn't report the size correctly, usually the OS will anyway. Your thoughts?

Second question is whether I can get away without using a floppy, I'd like to auto boot from CD for installing windows. I cannot remember if these old systems need a floppy to work properly. Thanks.