[philipstorry]

Quite the nostalgia blast for me!

I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.

If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.

Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.

OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!

[dardeaup]

There were also MFM and RLL hard drives. I don't recall if they were pre-IDE or something different altogether. It's been a long time.

[c0nsumer]

Yes they were. IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics because the drive could be connected directly to the ISA bus, using an on-board controller, vs. having to use an MFM or RLL controller on the bus in between it and the disk.

[mrspuratic]

I used MFM in the first PC I built from scavenged parts, it used an ISA MFM controller card. IDE came later, those had an integrated controller ("integrated drive electronics") so the PC didn't need to know how to do the low-level control for the drive. Luxury. And less jumpers to faff about with.

[cestith]

Also ESDI.

[Telemakhos]

> before SATA we had IDE

I had the original IBM PC with two 5.25" floppy drives, and I think that was all the room there was on the disk controller. Dad bought a 10MB Hardcard to expand it; that went in an ISA slot, if I remember correctly. The disk controller might have been in an ISA slot, too.

I think that pre-AT era would have constrained DOS <5.0 more than the IDE/SATA/SCSI eras.

[jmclnx]

I had added a 2nd disk on my 386sx, but I guess it was after the DOS 5.0 time. I did not realize before v5 it was not allowed.

Not long afterwards I ended up on Coherent OS, fun times.

[kalleboo]

I had 3+ fixed disks somewhere around 1997, but that was on a Mac (so built-in SCSI), and the drives were all hand-me-downs that I got for free, that I could just plug and play to add a few more hundred megs of storage.

[pjmlp]

And expensive, really expensive.

[lenerdenator]

I was gonna say, "MORE THAN TWO HARD DISKS? IN THE DAYS OF DOS?! Anything else we could get for you, your majesty?"

[forinti]

I have piles of old, but still functioning HDs now. I was looking at them yesterday and thought about how cheap these things have become.

I had to save up to buy floppies in the 80s!

[rwmj]

Not to mention the weight, power demands and (to some extent) noise!

At one point I did have two hardcards plugged into my Amstrad 8086 machine which felt pretty decadent. (Or maybe it was a hardcard plus the internal hard drive?) In total it wasn't even 100MB of storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

[cestith]

That, and the IBM PC 5150 had what, 130 watts?, in the stock power supply.