[tracker1]

You're jumping ahead a bit... early motherboards didn't have drive adapters at all, let alone IDE or PATA. And it wasn't really limited to two by the board and expansion slots nearly as much as the physical form factor and cost. "Full-height" 5.25" drives are double the height of what you think of for say a CD drive bay or later floppy drive bays. There were two in the XT/AT cases that were common. Hard drives went from full-height 5.25 to 3.5" pretty quickly and there weren't many half height or otherwise short 5.25" hard drives. There was a "big foot" drive that sucked, that I recall though.

Most people I knew with computers prior to 1992 or so either booted from floppy or had less than 40mb hard drives. They were expensive. By the time I got more into the hardware (1994 or so), dual IDE was common (4 devices) and PATA transition was pretty seemless. The only reason I'm even aware of the difference is I worked at iomega for a while, and the IDE zip drive was IDE and not PATA.

Around 2001, I had a motherboard with dual PATA and another PATA that was via onboard raid controller. I had 4hdds, a cd burner and an ide zip at that time. The drives I had first used were the first IBM Deskstar drives... fast, but died very prematurely... the second died before I could RMA the first. I had switched from OS/2 to Windows 2000 (not ME) around that time. Then came SATA, and no more rounding pata cables.

[RHSeeger]

When we got our first (10M) hard drive for our IBM PC (the original IBM PC), we had to buy a second case for it; because the power supply in the first one couldn't power it. On the positive side, it meant we had somewhere to put the TV we were using as a graphics monitor (since the main monitor was a green monochrome monitor).

[hypercube33]

Wow it's been a minute since someone talked about the IBM "deathstar" drives. I remember building a PC and dumping my last money into a hard drive - ended up with a maxtor but envied the benchmarks of those IBMs. They later started failing in droves.

[tracker1]

Yeah... it was crazy fast for the time, but when you lose, you lose. Not nearly as bad as the 3TB Seagate enterprise drives I had in an 8 drive array... 6 of the 8 failed days after the relatively short warranty. I've had exceedingly good luck with all the ssd/nvme drives I've used though.

[skopjadurk]

Built my first pc in 1987. RLL/MFM were the drive choices. I had a 32 MB had entering college and it was cheaper than 640 KB of DRAM DIPs. I upgraded to a 100 MB ide in 1992 for ~$220 US. But I Was booting from HDD from day 1 in 1987.