The sound of broken Hard Drives
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ส.ค. 2024
- Some time ago, I picked up a few hard drives from my local scrapyard. Unfortunately, the chances of picking up a working hard drive is less than 20%. Needless to say, I stopped looking for them. Only in rare cases, when a drive is still screwed to a drive cage, will I consider taking it. Before I will return the drives to the scrapyard, I want to share the sounds those drive make when we power it on. We will also look inside some of them.
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▬▬▬▬ Timestamps ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Intro
02:08 Quantum Fireball ST64A2F1
07:34 Seagate Medalist ST32122A
12:17 Western Digital WD100
14:05 Wester Digital Caviar 31200
19:48 Quantum Fireball read heads - บันเทิง
"Unfortunately, the Seagate drive doesn't work."
Classic Seagate, they still keep that tradition alive to this day.
It's amazing to me that people have been able to build things mechanically this intricate at scale and at somehow ridiculously low price.
Now that you mentioned it, the mechanics of drives from 30 years ago are still very similar to what we have today. And some of those old drives still work! Really amazing technology.
I got a new 14TB Exos, it has helium, and it sounds amazing, like a real HDD from those good old times.
Finally this is a real HHD, not those crap ST1000DM that fills every landfill nowadays
I wanted to get EXOS, but I got older used drives from an Amazon seller with HSMR technology. I wasn't comfortable with that - I thought I bought CMR drives. I sent the drives back mainly because they looked like they were used for 3-4 years based on the manufacturing date.
And if you look at what a monster physically-wise the first hard drive was (the IBM RAMAC from 1956) you're going to be even more amazed.
@@mima85 Nah i could probably build one of those. The "modern" hard drives (even from the 90s) yeah nah no way.
I enjoyed the non scripted / off the cuff content. Good 'ol spinning rust. It's crazy how many HDD makers there were in the 80s and by the late 90s / early 2000s just a handful.
Yes, right now, I feel like there are just two left. Seagate and Western Digital. I remember getting Samsung SpinPoint IDE drives for my Athlon XP rig. They were fast and I still have them. Unfortunately, one has died.
I think seeing a hammer in the pile of hard drives is a bad omen ;)
Hahaha, congratulations! You're the first to spot it! Yes, it is the tool of choice at this place to separate the PCB from the hard drive case.
That Seagate drive sounded like an air raid siren :D
True!
Nice video! Really enjoyed the unscripted content. Diving into non-working drives brought back memories of crashed hard drives that took games and save games with them. This is not something I miss from the “good old days”
Thanks 🙏 I guess I was lucky that I had maybe one drive dying with unimportant data on it. But the fear was always there. One bad incident made you value making backups.
I love videos about old hard drives. If they are not mechanically damaged there must be some way to repair them.
I'll try to fix some of them in upcoming videos.
By all means, I appreciate videos in this style from time to time. It spices things up a little and the content is just as interesting, even though in this particular case, there were no surprises (which is information in itself). Well, maybe that there wasn't more dust in the Quantum BuzzSaw ST. When I opened a drive like that once, there were shavings all over the place. To paraphrase Tom Dickson "Phew, binary smoke, don't breathe this!".
5:46 Call it the Quantum circular saw 😂
I loved the sound the thing made, or maybe its just nostalgia from where I was a kid in 1999 and had one
At least you can extract the magnets from the defective drives. They're great to use on the fridge.
2:55 Congrats on your new bench grinder
This reminds me of years ago in probably the early to mid-90s when someone called me over to their computer because it wasn't booting. I immediately noticed that I didn't hear the normal sound of the hard drive spinning. I believe it was a Seagate in probably the tens of MB range. The computer was sitting flat on the desk with the monitor on top, so I grabbed ahold of the sides and shifted it back and forth and the hard drive spun up, so I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and it booted! I suggested they didn't turn it off, or if they did and that happened again, just do what I did. Lol
To be honest, I like this unscripted video because your voice sounds more natural. 👍
Thanks for the blast from the past!
Haha, how some IT issues are fixed is still beyond me! Great simple fix though! Thanks!
so yeah....even if I don't like hard drives for personal use it was a fun video.
Now I`m 100% sure that this are the sounds that they used in 90s driving games.
The ones coming from PC speakers?? 🤣
My first hard-drive was a Quantum Fireball 640 MB (bought it in 1996). Still works flawlessly. Hope I never heard it scream like the one you have there :-)
Great that your drive still works!
So interesting, thank you very much for showibg us, your videos are always amazing! Have a great day!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
never put HDD heads under the microscope, cool! The first HDD had a small scratch, it could have worked... ;)
Interesting case the Seagate one: kept together by tape!
I like this new non-scripted format :)
Thanks Tony! I always wanted to know how read heads look like - and why they get damaged when they touch each other. Well, I still haven't found out why they get damaged. Surprisingly, the read heads look good, even the one that scratched the last platter in the quantum drive.
I could tell by the sound, that the first one was badly crashed 😵
the second one almost sounded like an Air Raid Alarm 😆
as a computer Hobbyist, My cousin used to repair hard drives, that he would buy at electronics swap meets, or were given to him, by an IT friend, who pulled them out of servers. he would check for any physical damage to the platters and/or heads and if they were OK, he would swap out the controller card from a crashed drive, of the same make, model and specs. and most times, he could get them functional again. not sure if he would do the same with the heads, as the space from the platters is so very critical, and he did not want to ruin good Platter(s) that could be used in another drive. I think he used Archival gloves to handle the good platters as not to get finger prints on them.
Great video thanks for sharing
As a hard drive collector it hurts to see this... I bet some of these drives still worked before people violently threw them into a giant scrap pile...
I totally understand! You're probably right - many drives work before they go for recycling. But at such a place, there is no escape. Most of them will be irreparably damaged when they're thrown around like bricks.
Thanks for letting me know someone collects hard drives ! ❤
@@vincentpremel4817 Im not the only one on TH-cam, and some of them have very impressive collections (Like DiskMaster who collects drives from the 80s and has a LOT of them, when I personally mostly focus on the 90s/early 2000s stuff)
It's sad to see these drives being open, especially if there is no obvious signs that's it's dead mechanically (like the last WD drive). Cause after being opened it's most likely beyond repair. Anyway, thanks for the video. Interesting, as always!
PS. There is a guy on YT that has lots of video about old HDDs - Arnold0. Maybe you can ask him something.
Thanks for the hint. I'll check since I have very little experience repairing hard drives. I still have a handful of drives that need to be fixed, and they're in much better condition and probably have a much better chance to be fixed than that last western digital drive.
from my experience more than 50% of the drive problams are in the controller card and not a mechanical issue
my cousin did it all the time, he repaired them as part of his computer hobby, if you don't leave then open and run
them... too long.... they can be opened for repair. unless you are working in or next to a dirt quarry 😆
@@GothGuy885 Older drives were much more tolerant. Sub 1GB you can probably open and have a decent chance of it working after, over 10GB you really need a clean room.
Disappointed that the Fireball didn't actually turn into one.
I liked this style of video :-)
Good to hear! Thanks for watching
This was interesting. Good stuff. Too bad you didn't get one of them working.
I like old hard drives, but in this case, I was sure there's nothing I can do for the first two drives. The two "silent" drives may be fixable though. I just need to learn how 😅
Interesting topic. Over my PC journey (started sometime in 1991/1992 with a 486DX33), I had better luck with Seagate HDs than most other brands. Until recently, I have never had a Seagate HD dying on me: I still have some 4-10-20GB in working condition (100% health), and some 160GB-500GB (IDE and SATA) also in perfect condition. These HDs are more than 20 years old.
During these years, I had issues with Samsung and Hitachi, (dying young, under 2 years), Maxtor and Western Digital not reliable.
My opinion about Seagate changed. Sometime in 2013, during a trip to Germany, I bought 4 Seagate drives at Alternate, rated for 24 hour operation (SV models) with capacities around 3 or 4 TB. The idea was to build a NAS, the drives tested OK and I put then in storage. It took a couple of months (perhaps 2 years) to get all hardware and resume the project. When I tried to use the hard drives, they were not OK: they had less than 200 hours online, were stored safely in a dry place, in their original packing, never dropped.
I bought Western Digital to replace those, and they are running OK ever since. I guess Seagate is not what used to be. It was not that one drive failed: all of then crapped (4 units).
Wow, that is very unfortunate that all four have failed! I had a couple of drives fail on me, but no pattern or something out of the ordinary. However, I did have many western digital drives and they were mostly ok.
Some jokes to go along.
German: "Seagate... nicht!"
French: "WD bien protégé mais non-accessible"
I didn't get it - j'ai pas compris
@@cheaterman49 protégé means protected. Well protected but not accessible (as in protected too well) and Seagate --> "Sie geht" and even better in certain Swiss German dialects "Sie geit" but it doesn't and hard drives are feminine in German (Die Festplatte).
🤣
Hitachi DeathStar
Quantum Fireball (no pun needed, they all went up in flames...)
Great content, don't worry about it 😁 I hope the analytics will agree with me hehe
Haha, let's see! Thanks for watching!
2:47 Ooooh damn! 😮
Poor drive....
I love old HDDs. I still keep them even if they don't work. The older the prettier.
My backups are all on HDDs, don't trust SSDs in the long term.
I don't mind seeing more non working HDDs videos, if you have the patience.
What was that red thing under the resistors? Some kind of glue?
I know that some very old and unused for a long time hard drives get seized up, and after a bit of motivation they start working. Wish all HDDs repairs were that simple.
Yes, the red thing under the resistors was some sort of glue. I yet have to repair my first hard drive :)
I actually saw a video where they were trying to use a new old stock sealed in box hard drive WD 10K RPM drive. It didn't work. I think it was DeBaur. I don't remember why he'd be using a hard drive. His channel is all about new stuff.
I haven't seen that video. But that shows that there's no guarantee hard drives will work when they weren't used and brand new.
@@bitsundbolts yup. one of many reasons Why I prefer SSDs. They aren't perfect, but usually you can get the data off. I did see one video on HDD Repair Services where the morons that made the SSD tied the chip and the controller. The controller was dead and so there was no way to get the data. He put the chip on an identical board with the same controller and it went into safe mode. He confirmed it worked prior to that. He said they are advancing the software. Maybe some day they can do chip off (direct chip reading) on that setup, but currently no.
That video was part of der8auer's HW-Legends series which is about old hardware
Even 20% of change of getting a working HDD from the scrap yard seems high to me. But at least trying if drives work doesn't cost much, it is worth the effort.
Actually I was very curious about the outcome of the WD drive. I have an old one with some data that I would like to rescue, but doesn't spin as well and I don't know how to proceed. It cold something mechanic (like the heads stuck against the platter) or electrical. I'm fearful of opening the drive to see if it is something mechanical and ruin the drive...
I think chances are high that a drive becomes unrecoverable after it's opened - just because of the dust particles in the air. I'm no expert, but I do have a few drives that don't spin up. I'm set to do research and try to figure out what's the issue. Will be coming up soon!
@@bitsundbolts Yes, I'm very reluctant to open it as well, should be like the last resort. I'm no expert as well and because they are such sensitive device, I never played very much with them. I think I will have to get some broken drives and do the same as you did.
Eager to see that video to learn a bit more 😀
I have more than 50% success in the scrap yard drives, just yesterday I brought a 171mb and 130mb all in perfect working order
Interesting video, as always. Question: do you use Steve Gibson's Spinrite to test and refresh the data as first order of business on those that are able to boot and get detected? If not I highly recommend it. Especially for older drives. Also it's really interesting seeing that program revive an ancient hard drive in real time.
Funny you mention him. I actually reached out and he did reply! He provided a licensed version of SpinRite 3! I'll be covering it soon since I would like to cover a few more hard drive topics in the near future. I also got another software called HDD Regenerator. Also a very nice tool!
@@bitsundbolts 🤣 that's amazing!! Steve's the man! To think a few Kilobytes of assembly code could do so much it's just incredible. Looking forward to watching that video soon! 🫡 🙏🏻
spinrite is great for refreshing fading data and to exercise the read heads... but if the drive is failing mechanicly there is little spinrite can do besides quickly recover as much data as possible before the drives flails completly
@@fft2020 yes of course. It's software, It's not intended to fix hardware issues, mechanical, electrical or otherwise. But IF the data is stale, or there are bad sectors on the disk platters, I think there is no better piece of software to address that issue and attempt a drive image or full backup as first order of business with these kinds of drives. On top of this, if they are working fine, they will see an improvement in performance. Been there, done that 100's of times with all sort of drives and disks interfaces. The improvement is indeed quite noticeable.
@@Kaio7 you are right spinrite is the best
This is Ouch! Video
If the sound was sharper/clearer I don't think anyone would notice the difference - lol -.
if you can get scrap drives maby its a fun idea to see what really happens when you swap PCBs around? :)
I'm planning to swap PCBs with some western digital drives. They're identical models. Just one works, the other one doesn't. Could be a simple indicator to tell if the PCB or the drive/motor is bad.
@@bitsundbolts maby also do some mismatching with drives that have bad sectors?
they just taped the drive shut? WOW! That's trashy as hell.
Yeah I don't like hard drives either. CRTs, parallel ports, hard drives. and physical media. I'm not a fan. lol My C64 runs on a USB drive thanks to my U2+ cartridge. Technically that's removable media.......but it's close enough to making it have an SSD that I'm good with it.
don't get me wrong. These devices are fascinating. It's incredible how they work, but I don't trust them and I prefer the silence of modern storage.
There is still something to the sound of old hard drives. I hated the noise back in the day and I believe Maxtor drives were among the most quiet drives. But now, I like to listen to the sounds of working drives. Nostalgia 😁
@@bitsundbolts lol I remember the C64 was a completely silent machine unless you're loading something. Then it's loud and obnoxious. 90's hard drives were also pretty loud an obnoxious. As a kid I was convinced sooner or later we'd have completely silent computers and now we do. That's what I prefer. But it's nice that you can go retro with just enough modern tech to make them silent.
6:03 sadly heads crashed
Yes - I was too late to rescue those drives. They were already thrown many times on the ground before I got there.
Half face reveal in this one lol
Poor drives indeed.
I still stand by HDD, I have them on my machine for storage and some light games.
Though, I do wanna move to SSD when the higher capacity ones get cheaper.
Haha, yeah - slowly coming out of hiding! HDDs are still preferred for storing large amounts of data. I am backing up my TH-cam projects on a portable hard drive, but I want to move to a NAS soon.
@@bitsundbolts Hahaha, slowly but surely!
One can never have enough backups, that's for sure.
No wonder, they have been thrown around for sure. No one of the involved guys cared about proper handling.
Yeah, very sad. They're literally thrown around like bricks.
I have so many broken laptop drives its stupid thank god for SSD's.
just the fact that a device that is tossed around like a laptop having a mechanical high precision device inside and working is a miracle... I will never trust laptop hard drives
Desktop 3 1/2 drives on the other hand are incredibly reliable... I still have my 40mb seagate from 1990 working fine with ZERO bad sectors
@@fft2020 I agree. I've had better reliability out of 3.5" HDDs than even SSDs. Also, 2.5" HDDs seem to break all the time so I wouldn't trust those even though I enjoy the idea of a miniature spinning drive.
I work in data recovery. You can tell a lot about how bad a drive is by its sound.
It is very sad to see those drives in this condition. I don't have a lot of experience with hard drives, but I wonder if anything can be done with the other drives that just don't spin up. What's the first thing to look for?
@@bitsundbolts on these older drives pcb would be the first thing. There is a model number on the pcbs. If you find a donor, swap the rom if it has one and hope for the best. I’d you hear a drive beeping generally the heads are stuck or spindle is seized. Not great options for old drives like these. Even head exchanges are out of the question. Tools and parts are nigh impossible to find.
Also, don’t open a drive unless it is last resort. You can tell a lot of a drive by how it sounds. If it initializes etc. dust and debris can rapidly kill heads. Plus, you were scraping the heads on the platter causing head and platter damage. These heads and more modern ones float just above the platter on a boundary layer of air and do not make direct contact with the platter.
If you do need to open them do try to have a clean room of some sort. Also if you have to relocate heads on a drive with the heads parked on the platter, you spin the platter away from the heads and gently guide the heads slowly to their new position.
If you think these ancient husks are marvels you should see modern drives that us lasers and microwaves for heat assisted magnetic recording.
Thank you for all this information. I'll try my luck on the remaining drives without opening them! That one Seagate drive (~200 MB) makes silent beeping/buzzing sounds. It might have the issue you described with stuck heads. How would I go about that? Is there a possibility without opening the drive? How would I try to unstuck the heads without letting them touch the platter?
noooo .. please take home some really old hard drives
people are crazy ! How can you be a retro enthusiast and not have a PC with a real mechanical hard drive of the era ?
People use compact flash but that is cheating! there is nothing like an old noisy hard drive
A retro build is only complete with the hard drive present, you can use a compact flash but just to make it easy to transfer stuff. but the hard drive has to be there
I also go to my local scrap yard and I bring everything below 4.3 GB and around 50% of the are in good condition even after being tossed around in the bin
just yesterday I found an IBM 171mb and a Conner 130mb all in PERFECT working order
What I've seen is that drives are thrown from pickup trucks to the ground. Most of those drives do not survive this. However, I fully agree. I feel the same way. If I see an old drive, I'll probably get weak and take it anyway. They all have different shapes and make different sounds. You have a point with hard drives and flash cards. With flash cards, PCs are significantly faster! I don't remember for PCs to be that fast and that is probably due to the lower seek time on flash cards. So, you won't have a proper retro build if you don't use an old hard drive. I agree with you!
Edit: and very cool that you found those old drives in working condition! I hope to find some of those one day too - especially a working Conner drive.
@@bitsundbolts 2 months ago I brought a seagate 130mb that didn't make any sound (dead) but I had another one here exact model with mechanical problems (it only started after 20 or 30 power on cycles) and I swapped the PCBs and the dead one came to life in full working order... it was a dead PCB
.
can you inspect the drives before bringing them ? those with visible toss marks like the one in your video with broken IDE plastic are more probable to be broken
last month I even found an MFM drive but has ripped orange ribbon cable but it starts and tries to seek... even after being dropped in a metal barrel
@@bitsundbolts Love your videos both scripted and unscripted. you are an inspiration to me
UAE really ????
Yes! Somehow this stuff ends up here in the desert
Scripted videos are a little bit more interesting.