Does anyone else collect the platters and magnets from dead drives?

Nope, yesterday I tossed ~10 hard disks after opening them and seen what's inside 😜

About the St351a/x: BEWARE, the stepper motors tend to fail! Mine just couldn't reach full rpm. What a shame, the disk was actually in perfect working state...

2fort5r wrote:

Someone mentioned Maxtors, and they are very reliable drives, not just certain models. I've owned about 20 over the years and none of them ever died on me, not even ebay-bought ones.

I also, have not, so far as I can recall- ever had a Maxtor go completely dead on me. My loyalty to these old IDE drives comes from my own positive experiences. I have no doubt that there have been a fair number of drives that have failed for other people, it just hasn't happened to me.

pewpewpew wrote:

EDIT: right, did a head count. I'm somewhat appalled to find 41 drives in the house.

I know the feeling.

For some reason I feel the need to have redundant backup supplies for pretty much everything... enough to last a lifetime. ROFL - pretty sure that there is something wrong about that particular need, but like I said, I like to be prepared.

Kind of like being a doomsday prepper for retro computing stuff. 😊

JoeCorrado wrote:

Kind of like being a doomsday prepper for retro computing stuff. 😊

Hehe there are quite a few like that on VOGONS. I sometimes get a bit carried away but so far have managed to keep everything in check. But then I live remote and don't have opportunities for cheap pickups.

I've become protective of my 2 largest IDE drives. One is a Seagate 750GB, the largest they made, but it has some SMART warnings. The other is a WD Blue 500GB that might not even have 1000 hours on it yet. It never had much use in it's original application, and it works totally perfectly (I've used it for video capture with no hiccups). I consider that one the most valuable, so I reserve it for situations where I actually need a healthy and large IDE drive. I've decided not to use it as general storage on my modern machine, even though it would be useful.

I had a Maxtor 30GB, don't remember what DiamondMax number, which suddenly just died in use - click click click frozen PC and game over. That's the only sudden death I've ever had on a hard drive. They replaced it with a 40GB, which finally has some bad sectors, and I bought another drive at the same time which was a Maxtor rebranded Quantum. If I remember right, it was the Fireball looking version of that 6E040L0 that was mentioned earlier. It eventually wouldn't spin up anymore, but I blame my cheap power supply for that. Years later, I found it working again.

The weirdest bad drive I have is a Seagate 7200.10 500GB SATA. When tested in HDAT2, it works perfectly for about half an hour or more, but then it suddenly just disappears. It stops responding to all commands, which of course causes the test to report errors in every remaining sector.
The SMART data shows that it once reached a temperature in the 70s C. I don't remember where this drive came from, or how it ever managed to get that hot, but I guess there's a problem on the PCB resulting from that severe event. When it's working, it works great, so I think the mechanicals are healthy. If I ever get a matching drive with bad mechanicals, I'd love to try swapping the PCBs and see what happens.

Had a pair of firmware bricked 7200.11s, fixed both of them, one of them was deployed and works great, the other was stored. 1 year later, that stored drive was tested and now it has a bunch of bad sectors. I don't get how that just happens sitting in a foam padded box, but I've given up on it.

2fort5r wrote:

Does anyone else collect the platters and magnets from dead drives?

Magnets. Very useful since they are so strong.

I like old hard drives. The noise they make is part of the charm of a retro system. Especially when its an old slow drive, and you can see and hear the computer seeking from disk trying to load up an ancient game. 😀

I've got a box full of old hard drives so they aren't really hard to come by for me.
Reliability is always a concern but I've been pretty lucky so far - the dodgy ones usually fail really quickly and the good ones just seem to keep going.

I'm running a Conner 504MB in my 386, and a Seagate Medalist 2GB in my 486. I've got a Quantum Firestorm 15GB in my Win 98 box. In my 286 I had a Seagate ST251 42MB which was an MFM drive.

DonutKing wrote:

I like old hard drives. The noise they make is part of the charm of a retro system. Especially when its an old slow drive, and you can see and hear the computer seeking from disk trying to load up an ancient game. 😀

I fully agree with this. For DOS the transfer rate is not as an important issue as for Windows 9x. So if you have Duke3D or Doom loading and you hear the HDD working while it plots the points is really a part of the retro experience. For the 386 I sticked to ~540 MB drives and I even have in a 486 the Seagate Elite9 disk running with 9 GB. (This is 14 platters, 5.25" FH). I had also a few dead HDDs in my life, one IBM 8.4 GB (no "Deathstar") and one Maxtor 120 GB. In comparison to the HDDs I used this is a very good rate I guess and I even have two IBM DTLA-305040 in use which still run fine. I have about 100 tested old HDDs that I can use for retro systems about half of it below 10 GB capacity.

DonutKing wrote:

I like old hard drives. The noise they make is part of the charm of a retro system. Especially when its an old slow drive, and you can see and hear the computer seeking from disk trying to load up an ancient game. 😀

I agree with this as well. I think it's really cool to hear a vintage drive churning away while loading a game - to me, that's part of the retro experience. That and I've personally got somewhere between 30-40 vintage drives in storage right now, with the smallest being a 20MB Miniscribe (3.5" HH MFM - might be useful if I ever get an XT or AT-class system) and the majority being 10GB and less. So, if a drive in one of my vintage systems happened to fail, I'd simply replace the drive with one from storage.

Also, I've only ever experienced two actual drive failures in any of my vintage systems - one was an 810MB Toshiba drive in one of my vintage laptops, namely, my trashpicked IBM 365X, that suddenly failed one day (click click click dead), and another was a 1GB Quantum Fireball in my P100 Compaq desktop that gradually got more and more bad sectors, essentially rendering it unusable. In both cases, I slapped another drive in and everything was fine again. Of course, your mileage may vary when dealing with vintage drives.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

but so far have managed to keep everything in check.

A) Everything is out of the rain.
B) Everything is inside the house.
C) You can navigate the more important areas without stepping around or over something.
D) Nothing (much) is on the floor.

DonutKing wrote:

I like old hard drives. The noise they make is part of the charm of a retro system. Especially when its an old slow drive, and you can see and hear the computer seeking from disk trying to load up an ancient game. 😀

Ok when it's just the seeking noise... but when they start to have a constant hissing noise I just can't stand it 😵

I like to use old hard drives. Those without FDB motor can be pretty annoying because of the noise from the bearing.
But how their head actuators... sometimes they sound somewhat like music to engineer's ear. 🤣

I have some hard drives from series known as faulty: Quantum AS, Quantum lct10, Fujitsu MPG, IBM DTLA, WD with TALON R/W channel... And all of them work fine. 😎

I also have some 5.25" devices: Seagate ST-251-1, Quantum Bigfoot 1280AT.

I usually record sound of my hard drives, add some technical parameters on screen and upload those records onto my youtube channel. All of them can be found in one playlist.

Logistics wrote:

I always do a low-level format on them, which always seems to resurrect clusters it thought were bad. But no SMART abilities is annoying.

Low level formatting on bad sector disks can cause a lot of more problems.
Use spinrite to ressurrect all the failing harddisks, most of the surface can be restored without need of low level format.
It is by age that the magnetic surface loses proper data, it can be regenerated and gained back full health.
The refreshing of surface's also makes the disk faster, because it does need to spend less time internally to do ecc correction on sectors being read.

JaNoZ wrote:

it can be regenerated

Counter view:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.xdsl … de=source&hl=en

If anyone wants to take it further, please start a new thread for that. Thx.

pewpewpew wrote:

Counter view: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.xdsl … de=source&hl=en […]
Show full quote

JaNoZ wrote:

it can be regenerated

Counter view:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.xdsl … de=source&hl=en

If anyone wants to take it further, please start a new thread for that. Thx.

Mod here. You just totally made my night.

But yes, no derailing allowed due to your link, please start a new thread if interested 😁

Here is what ya need
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Seagate-ST423 … =item2ed60925d8

I think I still have a couple full height 5.25" 50 pin SCSI Seagate drives in an enclosure, boy are they HEAVY.

what are you talking about, i pulled the lid off my 4gb HDD in dust environment and it STILL wouldn't die. low density gives them some advantages. i'd trust an IDE drive over an IDE SDD with the exception of touch book and or harsh environments.

2fort5r wrote:

Simpler to have mirrored drives from the outset.

Must say Imaging has gotten fall-off-the-log simple these days. I just popped a drive in a Linux utility box, and selected Create Image in Disks. Then ran the badblocks wipe test, and after selected Restore Image in Disks. Popped the drive back in its home box to confirm that really did take care of the MBR too, and fini.

For those who haven't yet: Mint Mate 17 is a very nice Linux for curmudgeons. A Live-DVD/USB will run adequately on most old P4 or AthlonXP boxen for utility duties like the above.

Thanks for the tip. A 2GB drive will be fast to image, but what about larger ones? I've been using RocketRAID 100/133 (and clone) cards for years to create small 2-4 drive arrays. Instead of adding an Ultra ATA PCI card to old computers, I drop one of these in. They work particularly well with those removable drive enclosures I mentioned earlier. And they work well with DOS as well as Windows. They've saved me a lot of grief over the years.