Radical Vision wrote on 2022-10-19, 10:58:
Got this SeaGate (not Barracuda or Medalist) 200MB, for cheap it works fine, no bad sectors..
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That's a great old drive 😀 I have a fondness for this era of hard drive since our first 486 PC housed in an XT case had a very similar drive. The anti vibration mounting and the front LED connector disappeared on all later generation drives. This era of drive and the MFM drives like the HardCard are my favourite harddrive sounds.
Always worth saving one of these especially old drives, where the rubber dissolving hasn't killed the drive.
I've got two of those Seagate ~250mb drives, one works perfectly and the other stops working after a minute or two of operation even after trying to change capacitors and stuff. Most other desktop drives from this era that I've had, did not survive old age. I've got a few older drives in the sub 1GB capacity range, especially for laptops, but quite a few of them the rubber noise damper dissolving has made them so that they only start when I give them a hard knock to free up the arm, which kinda ruins the drives after not very long.
I got this Compaq Armada 7350MT for cheap as untested and it's a real fixer upper, I bought it mostly for the fact that I know it contains an ESS wavetable. But it's a mass of broken plastic so far I've had to rebuild one of the weak points with superglue and baking soda.
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I did not realise just how hard it was to get a suitable caddy for this laptop though. No way I can find one for sale but huh, I happen to have the connector that fits it from my spare parts 'bin'. I wonder what the pinout for the 50 pin connector is? I'm planning to wire this connector up to a compact flash adapter. These things are rare enough that I'm not gonna bother trying this as a PCB project type, just wire it on direct to this weird connector:
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it looks pretty good inside so I'll give it a test run tomorrow - someone removed the NIMH bios battery a while ago and it's not corroded in there, but I do think a drink like coffee got spilled on it.