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Comment on Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?parent

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Upvoted you but...

A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5".

That's quite stretching the definition of "period correct". I mean: how could one have a 486 even less period correct than that? With adapters for more modern RAM and more modern CPUs and a 5090 somehow stuck in it?

> everything is period-correct EXCEPT for the hard drive and floppy drive

Hence why I couched my assertion with "except". IMHO its the best way to enjoy the original hardware experience without all the inevitable failures of using decades old magnetic storage media.

Side note, I had high hopes for industrial boards (Vortex86) as a means of letting more people experience the original hardware without having to lug around a boat anchor but when I tried one, the experience was fraught with all kinds of annoying issues (SVGA, etc)...

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