In the early 80's while working for General Electric Company I helped take apart a main frame computer in San Jose, Ca. It was sold to another company and we tagged cables and components. I recall a bolted together aluminum vessel about 30 inches in diameter and about 3 feet tall. Other people had mentioned that it was some kind of memory that spins in a vacuum. I think looking back that it was a hard drive. I recall that it was ''150K''. Later on in the 90's I was doing a job in a local refinery and mentioned that my new computer had a 1 Gigabyte hard drive. Two or 3 people told me that I was stupid, there was no such thing as a hard drive that big. I paid $300 for the hard drive alone. Funny, just yesterday I put in a 64 Gig micro SD into my phone. It cost $16 from eBay with free delivery.
Late to reply, I know, but the device you're describing was probably a magnetic drum. It would have been a cylinder spinning on it's axis, with the magnetic coating on the outside, and a number of fixed heads arranged around the outside in various places, reading and writing the magnetic surface as it span. They had a number of speed advantages compared to a disk, because you had no seek time (just the rotational latency), and no voice coil or stepper motor to move the heads across the surface, so they were often used as 'fast' swap space for systems. Were a lot more expensive, though, because of the number of heads and the electronics to drive them.
I bought a 8TB for $180, So for the $300 you said plus inflation is around $630 our time in the right now, Thats A stupid ammount of memory. I dont know we could prob get a small server for that price. Im guessing 35TB? :D Hi, It almost 2022 :p
@@Rabiiid When I worked in a refinery in 1997, I had a computer built by a tech friend who put in a 1GB hard drive. Everybody in the lunch room said that I was lying because NOBODY has a gigantic 1GB. Around that time hard drives were selling for $300 a Gigabyte.
I watched this video for the first time probably a decade ago, and now I own good examples of all three drives in the video. The Seagate ST-412 and Miniscribe 2012 are of course fairly common, but the Texas Instruments TI-5 is certainly a more difficult drive to come across. If it looks familiar, it's because they licensed production of the Seagate ST-506. The Miniscribe 2012 was most modern in 1981 or 1982, though I believe they did continue to sell until some time in 1983. 4:49 This is actually just the slider, whose job is to catch the air and lift away from the platter while it spins. The head is traditionally attached to one end of this, the trailing edge. Interestingly, because these drives both know and care so little about their functioning state, you could surely still seek that ST-412 around without trouble. I doubt those platters will hold much data if there's water ingress, though. It does seem to have a problem, though, as it never attempts to seek to cylinder 0. The stepper is probably damaged.
While the TI and Miniscribe drives in this video were pretty much done for, that ST-412 was still very nice on the inside and would have made a beautiful display piece.
it was sadly scrapped though (as in description) but they were failed so im not that worried i still would have kept the Seagate as the stepper motor is still good the rest i would have scrapped. unless they had the motors in it too.
the metals inside scrappers can get a bid of mnoey out of old drives like when i went to one and they had hundreds of drives lines up (most were from servers)
Marcus Cook My first PC had a 10mb hhd,ran at a blazing 3khz with an awesome 665k memory,the internet was a DOS prompt no GUI,oh the days of true challenges
I used to design tests to qualify all these Drives ST506 ST-212 but my favorite was the MAXTOR , (R2D2) amazing servo and I had S.N. 8.. Dozens of different companies from Japan and USA
I worked in Newbury Data's HDD clean room for a few weeks in the early 90's. Put them together and tested them. Capacity then was around 80MB, although we had a 320mb one on our 286 PC. Which was a massive HDD then, when the School I went to only had a 10MB total, I never filled it up as it was so huge back then...
Remember "stiction" in the 40MB Seagates? I used to power up the PC clone and then use my thumb to rotate the end of the motor shaft to get it unstuck. It'd then spin up and work normally.
"This one _was_ a Texas Instruments. Unfortunately it was stripped years ago." It still IS one. Just because something loses a part or few doesn't make it magically lose its model identity.
even old electronic tek can sit out in the weather for years and still run. some people are glad to have a graphics card work for more then a year. they dont make anything like they used too
Darkmaster M44 maybe stop buying non brand GPUs and get good ones, I had my old GPU last me 7 years. Nowadays things are smaller and more compact and finicky, you can’t just slap on a diesel motor on and have some piece of metal and call that a HDD anymore.
@@absterthedabster8628 "You're just buying the wrong ones if they don't work" is a terrible argument. Even cheapass hard disks of that era still work. Miniscribe occasionally shipped BRICKS instead of hard disks and a significant portion of their drives still survive to this day. There are even CMI drives out there that still work. An SSD of any quality *will* fail eventually, they have a finite lifespan. A mechanical hard disk, especially ones as crude as these, can go on forever if they're taken care of. If you keep them exercised, lubricated, and don't run them hot or jerk them around they will continue on indefinitely. The flash memory in a modern SSD will eventually degrade to the point it becomes useless and the drive will have to be thrown out. It's not a matter of buying the cheapest one, it's that everything is so cheap these days it's become disposable.
that last drive at 4:26 looks like it has beem submerged underwater for a year or 2 it would possibly look like that if it was made of aluminium which wot rust
Hmm, I'm not used to seeing hard drives that work more like floppy drives than modern ones do. I think it'd be funny to see someone cobble up some kind of floppy drive (like a Zip or standard one) with a swinging head arm like today's hard drives have; take off the disk jacket and make it... well... kind of work... at least a little, haha!
Ye olde steam powered drives :-) I used to run drives like those years ago on my xt machine with a westerndigital mfm card. 21 mb on a hdd, oooooooowww lol.
Cool video but if your plan is to restore the computer or use the hard drives, I would think opening them would not be the best idea, let alone dragging your fingers on the platters.
You can see how Miniscribe nearly got away with shipping bricks instead of hard drives and recalling them instead of shipping them out. Until someone squealed....
It is sad that what people are doing is throwing away a piece of history. Also for the people who say "It's useless" and things like that are the type of people to buy a new computer every single year. Think about it, in 10 years i'm sure about 95% of the people on the internet are going to throw away their old computers like they are junk. The thing about old technology is that it is a part of our history, and people that throw away WORKING things are throwing away our history. Think about it, people smash old hard drives that are 10 years old, when everyone does this, there is no more of these left anymore for people to have and when you do that there is no trace of that model of hard drive to be left. Think about old Miniscribe hard drives, most people find these in their homes and think of it as ABSOLUTE JUNK, but when you have thousands of people throwing old hard drives away and there WILL be a point where there is not a single one left to exist. Think about your computer you are using right now, you are just going to throw it away in 10 years so how does that make you feel? When you throw away a old hard drive that works fine there will be a point in time where not a single one of that model will exist anymore. This is what makes things like 80's hard drives so rare, a decade later everyone is throwing things like this away. By keeping these things you are preserving a part of history from that time period, and when everyone throws away their old hard drives and everyone that have used them dies, there is not a physical piece of history to be left. There may still be hard drives like these in the world like the Seagate ST-157A, but in 50 years I doubt anyone will have one and the only way you can change that is by keeping your old computers and hard drives and in 50 years be able to show your kids what it was like when you were around. In 50 years it is going to be like this, "12TB? That is really small!" remember when 1GB was enough to live on in the mid 90's? When you keep unique old things you are preserving history, and that is what Technology Museums are for, to preserve people inventions and show what they were like in that time period. If you read this whole what feels like a essay, I hope you think differently the next time you go to throw away your old computer or smash your old HDD because it is "Useless to you".
Ha, you said it "works"? It's not really gonna work if you get your fingerprints on it like that! If you haven't shown us data access then I wouldn't say it works.
I paused at 4:09 and said "Hey guys! come check this out! some guy on youtube found a really old HDD and I bet its going to look brand new inside!" presses play O_o that poore HDD!!!!!! email me more pics and notify me if you get more!
@@OmegaHellHound543 i have a seagate st-225n with that color and i cant get it to recognize on my old macintosh performa. Says it has bad sectors. I know not to touch it.
2 reasons not to touch it. 1: it’s vintage and you’re smearing all over it 2: if it shatters, it’s gonna basically explode in your face, and blow your finger off
Do you see how big *just* the spindle motor is on these? Components were much larger back then. I seem to remember seeing a comment from you somewhere else that full-height drives seemed like a “waste of space.” You seriously need to do some research on “computer evolution.” I personally love these big drives. I have some that are still working at almost 40-years-old. I bet no modern hard drives will still be working at that age.
In the early 80's while working for General Electric Company I helped take apart a main frame computer in San Jose, Ca. It was sold to another company and we tagged cables and components. I recall a bolted together aluminum vessel about 30 inches in diameter and about 3 feet tall. Other people had mentioned that it was some kind of memory that spins in a vacuum. I think looking back that it was a hard drive. I recall that it was ''150K''.
Later on in the 90's I was doing a job in a local refinery and mentioned that my new computer had a 1 Gigabyte hard drive. Two or 3 people told me that I was stupid, there was no such thing as a hard drive that big. I paid $300 for the hard drive alone. Funny, just yesterday I put in a 64 Gig micro SD into my phone. It cost $16 from eBay with free delivery.
Late to reply, I know, but the device you're describing was probably a magnetic drum.
It would have been a cylinder spinning on it's axis, with the magnetic coating on the outside, and a number of fixed heads arranged around the outside in various places, reading and writing the magnetic surface as it span.
They had a number of speed advantages compared to a disk, because you had no seek time (just the rotational latency), and no voice coil or stepper motor to move the heads across the surface, so they were often used as 'fast' swap space for systems.
Were a lot more expensive, though, because of the number of heads and the electronics to drive them.
I bought a 8TB for $180, So for the $300 you said plus inflation is around $630 our time in the right now, Thats A stupid ammount of memory. I dont know we could prob get a small server for that price. Im guessing 35TB? :D Hi, It almost 2022 :p
@@petergathercole4565 Yup, could have been. It was taken apart and the whole facility was sent to France.
@@Rabiiid When I worked in a refinery in 1997, I had a computer built by a tech friend who put in a 1GB hard drive. Everybody in the lunch room said that I was lying because NOBODY has a gigantic 1GB. Around that time hard drives were selling for $300 a Gigabyte.
Funny, these days people think I'm crazy for having a 20tb hard drive, probably won't be worth anything in 20 years
I even can imagine what kind of information this drivers was , i wish we could recover , will be a travel in time just like seeing this.
there is a company that could easily recover the data lol, they've recovered data from completely burnt HDD's from the 60s
kids will think this was made a day after life was on earth.
kids will think this is part of old steam locomotive computer
modest too eh ?
heres some advice that will keep you good for life ...no one likes a show off..
I watched this video for the first time probably a decade ago, and now I own good examples of all three drives in the video. The Seagate ST-412 and Miniscribe 2012 are of course fairly common, but the Texas Instruments TI-5 is certainly a more difficult drive to come across. If it looks familiar, it's because they licensed production of the Seagate ST-506. The Miniscribe 2012 was most modern in 1981 or 1982, though I believe they did continue to sell until some time in 1983.
4:49 This is actually just the slider, whose job is to catch the air and lift away from the platter while it spins. The head is traditionally attached to one end of this, the trailing edge.
Interestingly, because these drives both know and care so little about their functioning state, you could surely still seek that ST-412 around without trouble. I doubt those platters will hold much data if there's water ingress, though. It does seem to have a problem, though, as it never attempts to seek to cylinder 0. The stepper is probably damaged.
Holy CRUD, re that heavily weathered drive!
-- "Now, that hard drive's in pretty rough shape."
Oh my goodness, you're not kidding!
While the TI and Miniscribe drives in this video were pretty much done for, that ST-412 was still very nice on the inside and would have made a beautiful display piece.
Dirtiest hard drives I've seen to date :)
+MegaBojan1993
Old is not an excuse... it's simply left to rust and die. It didn't had to.
Those poor hard drives! How did you find these in a trash heap? At least the Seagate runs.
it was sadly scrapped though (as in description) but they were failed so im not that worried i still would have kept the Seagate as the stepper motor is still good the rest i would have scrapped. unless they had the motors in it too.
realgroovy24 tech What can anyone gain from scrapping a hard drive??
the metals inside scrappers can get a bid of mnoey out of old drives like when i went to one and they had hundreds of drives lines up (most were from servers)
realgroovy24 tech Wow. All people care about today is money. I would have kept the seagate.
+TheCRTman IKR.
The oldest hard drive I ever used was an 800MB Quantum that came with my first computer. Dell Optiplex of some kind, Pentium 133MHz 16MB of RAM.
Marcus Cook look unreal
Marcus Cook The first hard drive I had was a 10Mb in an IBM PC-XT, and that was my THIRD computer! LOL, Yes I'm old!
Marcus Cook My first PC had a 10mb hhd,ran at a blazing 3khz with an awesome 665k memory,the internet was a DOS prompt no GUI,oh the days of true challenges
Mine is a full height 15 MB, MFM in a Tandy external hard drive from the late 70's...
Alex Sinclair I got 40 mb one.How much can I sell it for?
Ah the 80s where hard drives were built better than today's cars
I used to design tests to qualify all these Drives ST506 ST-212 but my favorite was the MAXTOR , (R2D2) amazing servo and I had S.N. 8.. Dozens of different companies from Japan and USA
I worked in Newbury Data's HDD clean room for a few weeks in the early 90's. Put them together and tested them. Capacity then was around 80MB, although we had a 320mb one on our 286 PC. Which was a massive HDD then, when the School I went to only had a 10MB total, I never filled it up as it was so huge back then...
Is that Newbury in England?
@@Tech101yt Newbury Data in Winsford, though there were several around the UK.
"there was water inside" - Yikes!
Remember "stiction" in the 40MB Seagates? I used to power up the PC clone and then use my thumb to rotate the end of the motor shaft to get it unstuck. It'd then spin up and work normally.
Back in the day it was really cool as my dad said, Now one arduino can make hdd like this.
Found in a river?? :D
was there any data on the working hard drive?
This is cool
Does it have a sata interface ?
I like retro computers, old hard disk drives too :)
Are you TH-cam user kurtscottage? If not, you sound exactly like him!
Edit: Oh, you are! Cool!
"This one _was_ a Texas Instruments. Unfortunately it was stripped years ago."
It still IS one. Just because something loses a part or few doesn't make it magically lose its model identity.
probably still reads
i remember the early SASY, RLL and MFM drives from my early years as a server tech, using DEBUG and low level formatting them.
even old electronic tek can sit out in the weather for years and still run. some people are glad to have a graphics card work for more then a year. they dont make anything like they used too
Darkmaster M44 maybe stop buying non brand GPUs and get good ones, I had my old GPU last me 7 years. Nowadays things are smaller and more compact and finicky, you can’t just slap on a diesel motor on and have some piece of metal and call that a HDD anymore.
@@absterthedabster8628 "You're just buying the wrong ones if they don't work" is a terrible argument. Even cheapass hard disks of that era still work. Miniscribe occasionally shipped BRICKS instead of hard disks and a significant portion of their drives still survive to this day. There are even CMI drives out there that still work.
An SSD of any quality *will* fail eventually, they have a finite lifespan. A mechanical hard disk, especially ones as crude as these, can go on forever if they're taken care of. If you keep them exercised, lubricated, and don't run them hot or jerk them around they will continue on indefinitely. The flash memory in a modern SSD will eventually degrade to the point it becomes useless and the drive will have to be thrown out.
It's not a matter of buying the cheapest one, it's that everything is so cheap these days it's become disposable.
Call it Consumerism or Planned Obsolence. 😶🙄
Cool.
where did you get these?
and where can I get some of my own?
I miss that sound.
that last drive at 4:26 looks like it has beem submerged underwater for a year or 2 it would possibly look like that if it was made of aluminium which wot rust
I used to sell these drives; very expensive stuff in those days.
Nice
Hmm, I'm not used to seeing hard drives that work more like floppy drives than modern ones do. I think it'd be funny to see someone cobble up some kind of floppy drive (like a Zip or standard one) with a swinging head arm like today's hard drives have; take off the disk jacket and make it... well... kind of work... at least a little, haha!
Good thing youve got a fire alarm up there..
"In the rain _and_ the weather"? When did rain supposedly become something "different" from a type of weather?
Gonna make a game console and i am using a 1990's maxtor hard drive!
I love the seagate st 412
your gonna find software after rubbing your hands all over the platters ?
Ye olde steam powered drives :-)
I used to run drives like those years ago on my xt machine with a westerndigital mfm card.
21 mb on a hdd, oooooooowww lol.
5:12 please make a video on them!
your timestamp didnt work so 5:12
Cool video but if your plan is to restore the computer or use the hard drives, I would think opening them would not be the best idea, let alone dragging your fingers on the platters.
He mentions that the drive had water inside lol
I sadly broke my 2003 40gb hdd when opening it where the needle broke off
looks like they came from a lake.
Poor vintage tech.
Thats a lot of homework data
You can see how Miniscribe nearly got away with shipping bricks instead of hard drives and recalling them instead of shipping them out. Until someone squealed....
Reflex Photography NZ The Bricks probably had more storage space than the hard drives themselves!
television and cheese About as much use as a brick as well. I don't think they were particularly reliable either
You should run minecraft with shaders on it lol
Tovarich throw at them some spinning HardDrives.
It is sad that what people are doing is throwing away a piece of history. Also for the people who say "It's useless" and things like that are the type of people to buy a new computer every single year. Think about it, in 10 years i'm sure about 95% of the people on the internet are going to throw away their old computers like they are junk. The thing about old technology is that it is a part of our history, and people that throw away WORKING things are throwing away our history. Think about it, people smash old hard drives that are 10 years old, when everyone does this, there is no more of these left anymore for people to have and when you do that there is no trace of that model of hard drive to be left. Think about old Miniscribe hard drives, most people find these in their homes and think of it as ABSOLUTE JUNK, but when you have thousands of people throwing old hard drives away and there WILL be a point where there is not a single one left to exist. Think about your computer you are using right now, you are just going to throw it away in 10 years so how does that make you feel? When you throw away a old hard drive that works fine there will be a point in time where not a single one of that model will exist anymore. This is what makes things like 80's hard drives so rare, a decade later everyone is throwing things like this away. By keeping these things you are preserving a part of history from that time period, and when everyone throws away their old hard drives and everyone that have used them dies, there is not a physical piece of history to be left. There may still be hard drives like these in the world like the Seagate ST-157A, but in 50 years I doubt anyone will have one and the only way you can change that is by keeping your old computers and hard drives and in 50 years be able to show your kids what it was like when you were around. In 50 years it is going to be like this, "12TB? That is really small!" remember when 1GB was enough to live on in the mid 90's? When you keep unique old things you are preserving history, and that is what Technology Museums are for, to preserve people inventions and show what they were like in that time period. If you read this whole what feels like a essay, I hope you think differently the next time you go to throw away your old computer or smash your old HDD because it is "Useless to you".
If the heads were parked and water didn't seep in, maybe, just maybe, it would've worked just as well.
Just run SanDisk on that Mini Scribe, it will be fine.
Maybe a few bad sectors
"The motor might be all right."
* motorS
Why do you want to "scrape" it ?
+zaprodk its "scrap" and you can get parts and sell them
+Boxtentoo 112 If it to "scrap" them (scrapped in plural), then fix the video description.
***** Its ment to say scrapped, its a typo.
I know
can this hdd run windows 10
+Joe G
20GB didnt exist
Can it run Linux or Mac OS X?
Sounds more like an angle grinder.
Proof Seagates can outlast time itself. Anyone wondering how well a Seagate is. This is proof from an early age.
You sound just like New England wildlife & more
Like
Damnnnn 🤮. This guy is brave to run that hard disk. SOUNDS like a grinder..
Also please wear gloves while touching those.
sounds like a grinder
Keren banget
كيف يخزن البيانات
Hello again! :D I'm making a vid on my HDD collection, so check it out soon!
Also, using a new (old, 2009) Ubuntu 14.04 LTS laptop!
I want the seagate
If they work they could be sold for good money off eBay. 😏👌🖒😉😏
I'll play CoD on this
*1980s Retro DEATH Hard Drives
Ha, you said it "works"? It's not really gonna work if you get your fingerprints on it like that! If you haven't shown us data access then I wouldn't say it works.
Hell no you should not touch the disk Itself
I paused at 4:09 and said "Hey guys! come check this out! some guy on youtube found a really old HDD and I bet its going to look brand new inside!"
presses play
O_o that poore HDD!!!!!!
email me more pics and notify me if you get more!
2:04 really?? Don’t touch that shit. Those things are hard to come across. Do not destroy that
Hey is the first one suppose to have a burn mark on the platter?
It’s a different color than the newer ones. You still shouldn’t touch it tho.
@@OmegaHellHound543 i have a seagate st-225n with that color and i cant get it to recognize on my old macintosh performa. Says it has bad sectors. I know not to touch it.
2 reasons not to touch it. 1: it’s vintage and you’re smearing all over it
2: if it shatters, it’s gonna basically explode in your face, and blow your finger off
the 3rd hard drive is very bad but nice video
its funny to me that you think these are "really old" ... lol..
Why were these old hard drives so big? And why were they built like brick shithouses?
You have no idea how big hard drives really were before these ones. They were gigantic.
Do you see how big *just* the spindle motor is on these? Components were much larger back then.
I seem to remember seeing a comment from you somewhere else that full-height drives seemed like a “waste of space.” You seriously need to do some research on “computer evolution.”
I personally love these big drives. I have some that are still working at almost 40-years-old. I bet no modern hard drives will still be working at that age.
4:10 What The F
Why is it so dirty