🚀 go-pugleaf

>>My Uncle has a veterinary clinic in Waverly, Ohio.  He presently runs
>>VBOSS on a PS/2 Model 55 SX, and needs to upgrade from his present 60MB
>>harddrive to ~120MB harddrive

>According to my info, this is a 16Mhz 80386XS with and IDE controller and
>2 disk-drive bays in the machine. In that case, you can buy almost any
>drive. I think the cheapest will be to buy a non-IBM drive (IBM usually
>uses Maxtor!) . It should be possible to use the existing 60
>meg drive together with a larger drive...

Whew!  Don't trust that info!

It is a 16MHz Intel 386SX-based machine, 16-bit Micro Channel
Architecture.  However, you cannot just plug in any old IDE drive.

It uses a proprietary bus interface for hard disks, and IBM used special
ESDI drives.  Flavors made by IBM were 30, 40, 60, 80, 120, and 160M.
These are PS/2 ESDI drives that can be used in Model 50 (with the right
interposer card), 50Z, 55SX, and 70.  They are 3.5" HH drives with power
integrated right into the interface.  (No seperate power cable...)

The 55SX has two 3.5" HH bays.  Generally, one is for the floppy and one
is for the hard disk.  So, to upgrade the drive, you'd need to swap the
original drive (IBM only sold them with 30/40/60/80M drives) for one of
the larger ones.  Additionally, IBM's drives for these machines were not
Maxtor OEMed drives.  Depending on the drive, they were either IBM-made,
or OEMed from Seagate or Western Digital.

Thank god IBM chose SCSI for its current PS/2 machines.  (Not mention
it's a very speedy SCSI implementation as well!)

- Darius

P.S. I used to post here now and then on an unofficial basis as an IBMer.
     I have left IBM since then, so any posts are now even more
     unofficial.  :)  And they will probably be much rarer, as my current
     job should keep me very busy.
--
   BITNET: U39648@UICVM             | "I'd rather laugh with the sinners
 Internet: u39648@uicvm.uic.edu               than cry with the saints,
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |  the sinners are much more fun,
  "Don't set fire to strangers."       and only the good die young."
  - Mr. Zarniwoop                   |  - Billy Joel