First post, by Ozzuneoj
- Rank
- l33t
Okay guys, sound cards and video cards seem to get a ton of attention around here, but what about hard drives? In some cases, a CF to IDE adapter is nice, but in a lot of cases I love the sound of a hard drive doing its thing and I think the farther you go back in time, the more interesting it gets. Watching the activity light blink and hearing "kzzz kzz kzzzzz" from your floppy drive then seeing the HD activity light blink and hearing "chunk chunk chunk" as that little bit of data is written... awesome. 😀
So, lets use this thread to showcase some interesting things about these incredible mechanical marvels, some tidbits of useful information for working with them, good websites to go for references... and yes, you can post pictures of your collections as well. 😉
I've been going through my huge hard drive collection to sort out the good drives from the bad over the past few days. I'm surprised how many of my old Quantum Fireball drives still have 100% health in SMART and pass the short self test with no issues. I have a couple of Bigfoot drives as well... a 2.1GB that my brother purchased back in the late 90s which has hundreds of bad sectors (among other problems) and a 6GB that has a few bad sectors but still has 90% health in SMART.
I am running into a few older drives that don't seem to work at all on the system I'm using for testing however. I'm using a Dell Dimension 4500S slim desktop from 2002 for efficiency and XP compatibility so I can run Hard Disk Sentinel. It has an 845G chipset with an ICH4 southbridge (ATA-100 controller). A Quantum Pro Drive LPS (120MB?) doesn't seem to be detected no matter what I do. Jumper is set to Master (DS) Turning off UDMA in the BIOS doesn't help. I also have a Samsung WN321620A 2.1GB which shows up fine in HD Sentinel, with 100% Health in SMART, but it appears nowhere in Disk Management or in My Computer. Should I try using an older ATA-33 PCI card with these old drives? I have a feeling some of these are also going to lack SMART support, so if I have to test them on an older system with some manufacturer specific DOS testing utilities, I can do that later.
Also, the wording of the jumper selection on the ProDrive was kind of hard to decipher so I found a really nice document that has jumper settings for the entire ProDrive series. Just in case it eventually isn't on Seagate's servers anymore, I'll upload it here.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.