TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Ruru]

There's one other (local) forum where some of the guys would get crazy when you mention the word "BTC" to them. As in "Are you f***ing crazy?! That thing is a piece of crap, throw it away" or "I gave you a perfectly fine Teac all those years ago, and here you talking to us about BTC?!" Well, what can I say ... everyone has their own opinion of computer hardware & are chasing their own fantasies or unicorns.

Nostalgia aside, BTC really was a rather "odd" CD-ROM drive to say at least. It was built like a tank, but I guess you could call it quirky. It would either suddenly release, eject CD at full speed (and have it grinding inside the tray for at least 10-15 seconds) or it would get stuck and make crunchy sounds as if it was grinding gears inside, and the whole thing was falling apart. But then you would eject and reload, and it would work perfectly fine afterwards. In fact, you can clearly see the aftermath of ejected CD (at full speed) and what happened to the edges, while spinning out of control inside the tray:


Don't worry, it's just a generic Verbatim disc for every-day use, nothing too valuable that couldn't be replaced. Then again, there are moments where it would work perfectly normal for days. In fact, these things make interesting sound when seeking (moving laser up & down) due to the way the laser transport was built. Instead of having a servo motor bolted to the worm gear (as you'd normally expect on any modern CD/DVD unit) this thing uses 3 or 4 small plastic gears between the motor & worm gear to form a working transmission, speed reduction & torque increase. And that is what makes that specific, almost robotic sound. I guess the best way to describe it would be "WEE-HE", or "WOO-WHO", depending on the pitch & seek cycle.


It would seem as if I'm stockpiling these but the thing is, despite already having 7 or 8 of them pretty much all of them so far had been used or taken apart & used for parts (non-working units). But having quite a few of "Adison" cases from my childhood & rebuilding several of them according to the exact specs from back in a day, I absolutely had to use BTC on all of them. Yes, I suppose Plextor, Hitachi or Teac would have been a better choice, higher end but these things are not nostalgic to me, since I didn't have a Plextor back then ... I had BTC.

I remember my cousin's dad having a flying saucer as well, as he got the first 52x drives back in the day. Personally I didn't cheap out and paid a little more to get a good unit (I had a Philips 52x/32x/52x cd-rw) when those were the thing.

 

[Trekkie4]

This is our friend Clint he must be using this in Dos as it is only a 4Gb card. I think this is the one you are thinking about Trekkie4. Depending on how many ide cabals are on the PC and whether they reach I will get the PCIe one for easy access to change it.

Nope, wasn't that one. It was when Clint (or someone else, maybe?) talked about the Read & Write cycles & pointed out how CF cards cannot replace the hard drives due to that specific issue. Because after a while, they develop "bad sectors" (is that even the right term for CF card storage or SSD?) and essentially the memory chips degrade to the point where they lose all the data.

Since none of the memory cards were made for continuous writing. When you use the same thing inside digital camera for example you write to the card every once in a while. Where on the other hand Windows (and other apps, especially games) keep reading & writing to the storage all the time.

 

[Ruru]

CF actually uses IDE/PATA protocol so that's why a PATA->CF adapter doesn't need anything special on those.

 

[Trekkie4]

I remember my cousin's dad having a flying saucer as well, as he got the first 52x drives back in the day. Personally I didn't cheap out and paid a little more to get a good unit (I had a Philips 52x/32x/52x cd-rw) when those were the thing.

Most people seem to think that BTC mechanism simply can't keep it together & that the CD flies out on its own, but that wasn't the case. From what I can tell there was a programming (firmware?) issue, where the unit wouldn't spin down on certain occasions before ejecting the tray. Usually happens when pressing the eject button (which doesn't do anything) but then after a while it "remembers" that you wanted to eject & pops out the tray at random moment. Regardless of the disc inside & any consequences lol.

Still, I love these things. There's always so much work around BTC to keep you busy ... almost like driving & owning a vintage oldtimer - the work is never done

CF actually uses IDE/PATA protocol so that's why a PATA->CF adapter doesn't need anything special on those.

Oh, I know. I never said that it wasn't easy to set it up. IDK, maybe I'm just too old-fashioned. To be honest, I don't think I could have an old Pentium II or III without hearing that whining noise from inside the case, hard drive doing its magic

Especially my Quantum Fireball drives, these things have their own, whining sound specific to that era (late 90s and early 2000s) before Quantum was taken over by Maxtor.

 

[Ruru]

Most people seem to think that BTC mechanism simply can't keep it together & that the CD flies out on its own, but that wasn't the case. From what I can tell there was a programming (firmware?) issue, where the unit wouldn't spin down on certain occasions before ejecting the tray. Usually happens when pressing the eject button (which doesn't do anything) but then after a while it "remembers" that you wanted to eject & pops out the tray at random moment. Regardless of the disc inside & any consequences lol.

Still, I love these things. There's always so much work around BTC to keep you busy ... almost like driving & owning a vintage oldtimer - the work is never done

I remember my Philips also not being a flawless drive, it didn't eject its tray with a disc inside until you ejected it via software. Weird bug, though I never tried to search a solution for that.

 

[Trekkie4]

I remember my Philips also not being a flawless drive, it didn't eject its tray with a disc inside until you ejected it via software. Weird bug, though I never tried to search a solution for that.

Fun fact... Earlier verions of BTC CD-ROM drives (and some of the RW ones as well, model BCE 62IE in particular) were using Philips loader, mechanism. Unfortunately these things were prone to motor failures and pretty much all of of them suffered from the same demise - the spindle motor would give out


You can clearly recognize the older generation from the newer "XH" series (letter "H" indicating Hitachi Loader ... probably) by the way it was designed. BCD XM (Philips) is the one with square door flap/trim, where the oval one(s) are XH series.

 

[Ruru]

Those cd player buttons were nice, I remember using a spare PSU and a CD drive so I could listen some tunes when I tinkered around with my main system

 

[Trekkie4]

Those cd player buttons were nice, I remember using a spare PSU and a CD drive so I could listen some tunes when I tinkered around with my main system

Indeed, these things had the entire audio conversion circuitry inside. Basically a DAC (Digital to Analogue converter) and a small amplifier. The idea was to take away all the stress, workload away from the CPU & onto the CD drive, so that the actual computer could perform better. That was very important back in the old days, when everyone still had 386/486 & 5x86 systems. As the technology moved forward (around early 2000s) they removed everthing, leaving pretty much just the LED and eject button.

Edit
Fixed all the typos, sorry. That's what you get when you multi-task

 

[lexluthermiester]

You could still use larger storage, but you would just need to have a partition of 2GB for DOS, correct?

As a rule, yes. DOS can address and run from larger partitions upto 8GB though. 2GB is ideal however.

All on mechanical hard drives of course, but would this same approach work on the CF stuff?

Perhaps some clarity is needed. The interface that CF cards use is the PATA spec protocol. The connector pinouts are identical. The adapter only provides a pin-passthrough and power for the card. It is literally a native PATA IDE SSD, and the original form of such.

Are they a good option for Windows 7 systems?

As for Windows 7? Why would you want to?

I have a core 2 quad system i've had to fix where the motherboard is technically just IDE with sata convertors

Ok, I might be missing something...

so without TRIM support etc it's apparently a good way to get an SSD to die a fast death.

All SSDs made since about 2016ish have TRIM built into the NAND controller firmware and will automagically take care of trash data cleanup. Even cheaper DRAMless SSDs all have that feature. It's not really something you should worry about.

They have a modern 1TB mech in there, but the concept of a CF boot drive in lieu of an SSD never occured to me

It would work, certainly, but you'd be limited to the ATA7 bandwidth, which is 150mbps IIRC. If that's not a problem for you then, heck, go for it. You'll be fine.

Especially my Quantum Fireball drives, these things have their own, whining sound specific to that era (late 90s and early 2000s) before Quantum was taken over by Maxtor.

For those of you wondering or feeling nostalgic...

Is it bad that I actually miss the sound of those old Quantum 5.25 Bigfoot drives?...

Drive sounds starts at 0:45.
And from Phils Computer Labs

 

[The red spirit]

I got chills when I saw that manufacturer, one of their units murdered an innocent 6600 GT over 16 years ago.

After that I haven't used any low-tier PSUs, so a lesson learned there

They are extremely common in Lithuania. Probably have 25% market share. Most of them work perfectly fine. They are just not very efficient, lack high end features and etc., but they are usually adequate. In one of the older computers tha I had, one of them survived for over 13 years. I have newer 500X model as spare also from torn down computer. It's just that there isn't any sense in buying them today. You can get much more efficient, better specced Xilence PSUs for same price. Xilence is just Be Quiet's value sub-brand, so quality should be there too.

BTW most people don't ever read rail amperage and I'm sure that some people "kill" (trip, if it has proper protections, which is now very common) power supplies due to that. That's particularly important for older systems around Fermi and Terascale era and absolutely mandatory for SLi or CrossFire rigs. Not to mention that CPus of that era were also woefully inefficient and guzzled a lot of power. So 500 watt unit might be only enough for Core 2 Quad with HD 4870 only. Even Athlon 64 era chips were really bad at power efficiency. Once you add other components with basic card like FX 5200, you are already at ~250 watts. Pentium D systems are probably the worst in that aspect.

 

[Ruru]

They are extremely common in Lithuania. Probably have 25% market share. Most of them work perfectly fine. They are just not very efficient, lack high end features and etc., but they are usually adequate. In one of the older computers tha I had, one of them survived for over 13 years. I have newer 500X model as spare also from torn down computer. It's just that there isn't any sense in buying them today. You can get much more efficient, better specced Xilence PSUs for same price. Xilence is just Be Quiet's value sub-brand, so quality should be there too.

BTW most people don't ever read rail amperage and I'm sure that some people "kill" (trip, if it has proper protections, which is now very common) power supplies due to that. That's particularly important for older systems around Fermi and Terascale era and absolutely mandatory for SLi or CrossFire rigs. Not to mention that CPus of that era were also woefully inefficient and guzzled a lot of power. So 500 watt unit might be only enough for Core 2 Quad with HD 4870 only. Even Athlon 64 era chips were really bad at power efficiency. Once you add other components with basic card like FX 5200, you are already at ~250 watts. Pentium D systems are probably the worst in that aspect.

Even with older builds, I prefer a reputable brand. Just got an old Acer pc (which I'll upgrade as the board supports only Celeron/P4), it has a 300W FSP, I'll check is its internals ok.. I'll probably build a little C2D rig using that case & PSU.

edit: But yeah, modern hardware handles better with lower wattage PSUs. No problems running R5 3600 & 1080 Ti with a 550W Fractal Ion Gold PSU.

 

[Trekkie4]

For those of you wondering or feeling nostalgic...

Is it bad that I actually miss the sound of those old Quantum 5.25 Bigfoot drives?...

Drive sounds starts at 0:45.
And from Phils Computer Labs

Oh, yeah!! I got several of these, including lct model. But the original (and my own) Quantum from back in a day is "EX" Series. Some people cannot stand Quantum's high pitch whining but I find it enjoyable & nostalgic

One thing which SSD will NEVER have... These youngsters nowdays don't know what they're missing!

 

[Ruru]

Playtime's over...

Ran all the tests with one card, now let's get to business.

 

[lexluthermiester]

One thing which SSD will NEVER have... These youngsters nowdays don't know what they're missing!

And now we're grumpy old men!

Playtime's over...

Ran all the tests with one card, now let's get to business.

Nice!!

 

[The red spirit]

Even with older builds, I prefer a reputable brand.

That's totally understandable, I personally wouldn't buy Codegen stuff either, but if I got one for free, I wouldn't feel too bad about using it.

Just got an old Acer pc (which I'll upgrade as the board supports only Celeron/P4), it has a 300W FSP, I'll check is its internals ok.. I'll probably build a little C2D rig using that case & PSU.

FSP is great OEM, so it should be decent unit, as long as wattage and rail amperage is sufficient. But since it's Pentium 4 computer and you most likely don't want to be stuck with onboard graphics, it will most likely be replaced. Pentium 4 alone probably uses half or more of its capacity.

edit: But yeah, modern hardware handles better with lower wattage PSUs. No problems running R5 3600 & 1080 Ti with a 550W Fractal Ion Gold PSU.

I ran Athlon X4 845 with RX 580 off 450W Thermaltake Litepower, it worked fine despite PSU calculator estimating whole computer's wattage to be at 355 watts. That's definitely a close call and I wasn't comfortable doing that, but it worked great. Computer also worked great with Furmark and Prime small FFTs running at the same time.

 

[r9]

Fun fact... Earlier verions of BTC CD-ROM drives (and some of the RW ones as well, model BCE 62IE in particular) were using Philips loader, mechanism. Unfortunately these things were prone to motor failures and pretty much all of of them suffered from the same demise - the spindle motor would give out


You can clearly recognize the older generation from the newer "XH" series (letter "H" indicating Hitachi Loader ... probably) by the way it was designed. BCD XM (Philips) is the one with square door flap/trim, where the oval one(s) are XH series.

Love them cup holders.

 

[Greenslade]

And now we're grumpy old men!


Nice!!

Speak for yourself Lex

 

[The red spirit]

One thing which SSD will NEVER have... These youngsters nowdays don't know what they're missing!

And it's mostly for the better. I ran two WD Raptors (they run at 10k rpm) in RAID 0 and they still were quite slow. Things like Bigfoot HDDs are quite interesting for first 10 minutes of booting up computer and hearing all those different sounds, but it gets really old really fast. I'm not even 100% sure that people back then really liked all those computer sounds.

 

[r9]

Oh, yeah!! I got several of these, including lct model. But the original (and my own) Quantum from back in a day is "EX" Series. Some people cannot stand Quantum's high pitch whining but I find it enjoyable & nostalgic

One thing which SSD will NEVER have... These youngsters nowdays don't know what they're missing!

Out of all the things you picked platter driver as an example. lol
What else ball mouse ? lol
I definitely don't miss either of those.

 

[Trekkie4]

And it's mostly for the better. I ran two WD Raptors (they run at 10k rpm) in RAID 0 and they still were quite slow. Things like Bigfoot HDDs are quite interesting for first 10 minutes of booting up computer and hearing all those different sounds, but it gets really old really fast. I'm not even 100% sure that people back then really liked all those computer sounds.

Well, I do! IDK, to me it's perfectly normal, something you'd expect to hear from inside the computer case. Kinda like the whole gasoline/diesel engine vs electric one. You expect to hear your engine while driving around, so when you don't it feels as if something's not "right".

I guess you could say the same for hard drives. It's a good thing I've decided to add 2 additional (mechanical) drives on top of SSD because I don't think I could handle it otherwise. Same thing with CD-ROM (and DVD), I couldn't imagine having desktop PC without having to listen to DVD drive seeking data, or spindle motor accelerating at over 10 000 RPM.

Out of all the things you picked platter driver as an example. lol
What else ball mouse ? lol
I definitely don't miss either of those.

Well, I never said it was a rule or a law to have one lol But yeah, personally I couldn't imagine PC without one. This here is actually my one (and only) SSD:


But in addition to WD Blue I also took the liberty of adding two mechanical drives. WD Gold (2TB) & generic 320GB WD for WinXP setup:


As for my other system, I'm running 3 mechanical drives ... and STILL find the system to be too quiet for my taste.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I ran two WD Raptors (they run at 10k rpm) in RAID 0 and they still were quite slow.

Compared to what?!? Other HDDs of the time? No they fricken were not slow. Raptors were even competitive with SCSI-320 drives. Only SCSI-320 15,000RPM drives were faster. Compared to modern HDD's, yeah ok, they're slower NOW, but certainly NOT then... And to compare to SSD's is just silly.

 

[Ruru]

Compared to what?!? Other HDDs of the time? No they fricken were not slow. Raptors were even competitive with SCSI-320 drives. Only SCSI-320 15,000RPM drives were faster. Compared to modern HDD's, yeah ok, they're slower NOW, but certainly NOT then... And to compare to SSD's is just silly.

They were practically the best you could buy before consumer SSDs came.

I still want a Raptor, must get one some day.

 

[lexluthermiester]

They were practically the best you could buy before consumer SSDs came.

I still want a Raptor, must get one some day.

The 300GB and 600GB versions are the best to get.

 

[Ruru]

The 300GB and 600GB versions are the best to get.

The Velociraptors? They looked cute as they were 2.5" drives with a 3.5" enclosure which acted as a heatsink.

edit: Also the Raptor X drives looked hella cool with their windows.

 

[lexluthermiester]

The Velociraptors? They looked cute as they were 2.5" drives with a 3.5" enclosure which acted as a heatsink.

Yeah. As long as you mount them in a metal chassis case with proper airflow, the heatsink tray wasn't needed.

edit: Also the Raptor X drives looked hella cool with their windows.

Heck yes they did!!