Checking out a giant lot of 38 hard drives, will they work?!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 พ.ค. 2024
- This is the largest lot of drives I have ever bought since since I started growing my collection. 38 untested drives, 80€ (50€ for the drives, 30 for shipping, mind you each box was about 10kg)
A lot of the drives were newer ones that I don’t usually go for, but for about 2.1€ a piece… And there was also a few nice older drives in there as well, including a rare and very interesting Micropolis Mustang 4540A, which probably is the very last series of drives Micropolis made before they shutdown in the mid to late 90s.
Obviously being untested, there’s the risk that most of the drives will be dead, you know, ""untested"". So let’s find out if these work…
-- Spoilers for the results below! --
The results really were incredible, out of 38 drives, 33 start up (two of them after a small PCB fix), two have bad PCB (one of which is confirmed to be a good HDA with no bad sectors and only 3 are completely dead!
Out of the 33 drives, only one has major issues, and a few more have minor ones like a few bads and/or reallocated sectors, but most of them were just happily working. Sadly, the one drive with major problems had to be the micropolis one, but considering how good the lot was, I really can’t complain. (Thanks, FAT16, for taking so little space that the file system fits between the bad sector patterns, in a similar way as that SCSI IBM with bad sector patterns I have)
Here is the place where I’ll tell something very important and maybe unexpected. I formatted all the drives and installed the OSes I demonstrated on them. However, I took a quick look at the newer drives before doing so, just to see when they were last used and stuff. On two of them, the 1TB hitachi and newer 500GB Seagate, I found recent files, as new as 2022, including identifying information and even bank details etc… I didn’t actually open the files but just saw from the file names and thumbnails. I was a bit shocked at how careless the people that used to own those drives were. My assumption is that those drives came out of computers that were thrown away that the seller grabbed out of some recycling place and pulled the drives out of them. If you guys ever want to throw a PC away you should honestly at least delete your files and preferably wipe the hard drive first.
It’s far from the first time I get drives with data in them, and it can be interesting to take a look at old programs on drives from the 90s, but finding actual recent data was a first (well I don’t usually buy drives as new as these were but anyways…)
I get mine mainly from working Apple Macintosh older 80's and 90's SCSI based machines. Yard sales, deceased estates and Goodwill stores and thrift shops. Most of the drives you get in lots tend to be scratched/as-is, not working etc........ Either way the very early large drives from 5.25" are what fetch the huge money if they are working.
That went way better than I would have expected! I am so glad the seller actually packaged those as good as they did, that probably helped a lot of those drives out and seems like they escaped with no physical damage from shipping! The Micropolis Mustang you are lucky you got that drive to work at all I will be honest, those are extremely fragile and although they are supposed to be more premium grade consumer drives, they still seem to have a high failure rate from what I have seen. Glad that all the Seagate Medalist drives survived and proved that they deserved the medal on the label haha. The attention to detail and quality of the video was amazing, and that must have taken a really long time to produce! Great work!!! As for the ST500DM002, I still am amazed how many of those have reallocated sectors while the older Barracuda drives work perfectly fine?? Either way, you got so many good drives that work for the price!
Holy crap thats alotta drives! Absolutely love long videos like these 😁
Some of the later Maxtor drives will do a full seek test after initialization.
Why my hdd so slow (them) because your hdd has infinite ♾ bad sectors
I see that Westren Digital 21200 was made in Malaysia. WD made a huge mistake moving to Malaysia in 1998. Those ones had a high failure rate
What a bizarre bet! Eating a shoe, A dog would do that!
Wow, awesome haul! You’re lucky to keep finding these lots of hard drives lol
Not bad especially how you managed to snag a 1TB in good working order! Some of those smaller hard drives are ideal for use with older computers, or for people who want to restore an older PC to how it would have been back in the day.
Hello Arnold0, great video, I have a question today, I bought a Quantum Prodrive els 85AT and I think it is suffering from the rubber bumper problem, I just posted a video on my channel and if you could, could you tell me if this Does the hard drive have a long useful life? I installed windows 3.11 and it works perfectly with 0 bad sectors so far.. I'm waiting for your response!!
It's really incredible how well this lot turned out. Quite a few nice models to pick up, so I'm very glad for you that it went so nicely! Always liked the Conner Seagate's & that Mustang really sounds awesome. Was really cool to hear it boot into Windows, which is definitely a nice feat based on the commendable effort required for that! A few of the modern drives like that 1TB Ultrastar look like they may still come in handy (given their perfect health on some!), which for the price is additionally crazy.
Micropolis Mustang - love seeing such incredibly rare drives 🤩
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NICE, new video
the U5 at
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Those drive sounds take me back! I remember the days of knowing what drive was in a PC from the power-up sound.
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