Seagate ST-506 Vintage 5MB Hard Disk Drive - Using on a Vintage PC.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- This video demonstrates how to connect an Seagate ST-506 - 5MB (Yes, you read that correctly) vintage hard disk drive to a vintage PC.
It then takes you through how to low level format it, using a Western Digital 8-bit MFM controller, prepare it for use with an operating system such as MS-DOS, and finally run a series of tests to verify the status of the drive.
The ST-506 was the grandfather of desktop disk drive technology. It's a full-height 5.25 drive and predates the ST-412 -10MB drive that was shipped with the first IBM PCs.
nice and informative video. Your ST-506 is in gerat condition! Greetings from CPUGALAXY
Welcome to CPUGALAXY. Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, this is the first time this drive has ever been formatted. A true NOS drive.
Pentium II: "I'm a vintage PC."
Seagate: "Hahahahhahaha...."
MSDOS 6.22: naaaa, you need the version 1.0, 2.0 or 3.3 to that 5 megas HDD. XD
Indeed .. these arent even techs of same decades ... I remember paying an insanely ammount for a 200Mb Seagate disk for my 386DX25 with 8Mb of ram ... to hold all my pirated ms-dos games ... lol. just imagine how many games I coulda baught for those nearly 1k $ i baught the disk for. I think that 200mb disk was about the highest consumer ide disk I could find at that time.
@@mrdali67 almost two decades between Pentium II and this ancient hard drive predating the first IBM PC.
@@mrdali67 I was actually surprised they even worked together.
@@mrdali67 A bit like putting a PCIe SSD into that Pentium II... :D
I thought I would never see a computer with more RAM than hard disk storage.
It's not that uncommon, I was connecting 1Gb drive to machine with 4 gigs of memory recently. But yeah, here we have more than 12x difference
You are so lucky, to using this aged pieces, this is reminded me with old memories, thanks for trying and your efforts and have a great day. 👍👍👍
LOL, such disks instead of capacity should be measured in kilograms and horsepowers. Had these things in PC XT boxes in my old workplace 28 years ago. One of those PCs was put on wonky computer table. When disk was in action, poor table visibly jerked around.
I'm surprised a Pentium 2 actually still supports that controller and HDD.. I would have expected you testing that on a 386..
also, does your KVM really say "swtich" on it? lol.. chinese quality.
It was the least vintage machine I had lying around that supported ISA 16-bit slots and PCI, which I need for other projects. It continued in production until 2001. That normally makes it cheaper for people to buy than a 386 (generally speaking). On Ebay (UK) just now, £275 including shipping for a 386, and £120 for a Pentium II.
Well spotted in terms of the KVM: yes, it really does say swtitch. The only defence I could offer would be that their English will no doubt be better than my Chinese lol.
Thank you for sharing historical HDD. Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.
thats a gem! i have a 10mb mfm st-412 and i am very proud that it still works perfectly, just recently LLF'd it...but i never saw one of those 5 mb ones in person
'AND IT RUNS QUIETLY.'
Ya that was amazing how quiet it actually was. I remember swapping a Motherboard with a friend where I aquired an adaptec scsi controller and 3 51/4 used 7200rpm 200mb Discs in an external harddisk box that had been used in a server, and those drives was working fine, but they sounded like turning on a chainsaw when they spun up wich made them practically unusable for using at home.
Hahahahahahaha
@@mrdali67 that was sarcastic, dude.
I once had an old tape player that I bought and when I opened it up to check the belts inside the previous owner had left an old page from a magazine inside. He used it to right notes on the belts, but on one side of the page there was an advert for this exact hard drive. 5 MB of storage for $5000. I was amazed how far we have come in price and capacity.
That price is astounding. People were prepared to pay it, so it must have provided some real advantages to them over floppy discs.
$100+ per MB ram is what I remember and name brand PC's with a baseline costing $5000 or so. This drive pre-dates all that tho as I save hard drives and I only have one 5.25" HDD and many 3.5" with extinct names like Priam & Fujitsu off top of head. I wasn't into computers til the AT and the clones came along.
@@xenuno Fujitsu extinct ? They're huge and part of Siemens ! I have one of their laptops which I bought 2 years ago and its the best made, most reliable computer ive ever owned. I will certainly buy from them again !
@@peterbustin2683 Fujitsu sold their hard drive industry to Toshiba in 2009. They still make them but rebranded as Fujitsu Toshiba
But the st506 sold for 1,500 brand new.... not 5000. It's value would have been around 5000 today though, so that magazine doesn't make sense at all. Considering it came from that time, it should of said 1,500. no wonder the previous owner ripped it up and used it as material, it was full of scams!
My smallest ever HDD was a 60mb Megafile on an Atari ST...
But by god , that hdd is gargantuan in comparison..
Good Video. I have not seen spinrite in over 30 years. I remember getting hard disk drive information was like pulling teeth 35 years ago.
Thank you for your comments: glad you found it useful.
I personally use Norton Calibrate. It's included with Norton Utilities 5.0. It does a very good job.
When I was installing drives in AT (286) machines you had a fixed 23 entry table of drive geometrys built into the BIOS ROM. If your drive didn't match you might try a drive type less than your number of cylinders, or even heads. You loose storage but at least the drive worked. You could install ROMs on a ISA card that would override the standard drive types and get a a better match. Generally a problem for newer (than the PC AT) higher capacity drives.
And to think a chip the size of a discarded fingernail can hold 1000gb of data and write speeds nearly 600mbps!
looking forward for this comment 20 years from now
600mbits is old i have an m2 ssd 56,000 Mbits per second thats 7gb per second but i had also 20mb hard drive almost 30 years ago
@@dmtd2388 but its bigger than a discarded fingernail
That is all impressive, but what’s tangibly impressive in this video is that he booted DOS from a floppy disk that probably has a more precise magnetic R/W head than the HDD.... in a removable cartridge with a Mylar platter.
(The floppy will have 720KB per side, while the HDD with four heads equates to about 1.2MB per platter side, on a much larger diameter platter.)
@@nickwallette6201 My LS120 drive disk has 120mb :O and my Iomega zip drive disk has 100mb. all in a 3.25 inch Form factor
:D
I was given a Seagate ST506 in around 1995 but couldn't get it to fly on my WD1003 MFM controller card. I figured it was because of its unbuffered seek. The stepper moved away from park but I couldn't get much co-operation from a boot floppy and SpinRite on 5.25 inch floppies or any Format command even with /s syntax (Dos 5), so I gave it to the pre-teen boys down the street to explore inside (they're robotics engineers now).
5mbit data rate .... FIVE!
Theoretically, you could sweep out of this drive, those 5 megabytes in 8 seconds.
In those years of HDD evolution, density has gone way way way up, that the bus ended up being the real bottleneck, while moving on to solid state.....
Don't think so, bus data rate was the easiest thing to upgrade. HDD's was always failing to hit it even with linear read rate, and real reason for SSD being faster in real life is mostly a seek time.
In 2021 6 months after this video. a Pentium 2 machine is over £100 because during lockdown people are buying them for 1990's games lol. Same with Pentium machines. 486 machines are nearly £200
Very calming video on the vintage drive. Thanks for the upload!
You are welcome.
WTH!!! 5MB? It's only fit one Mp3 file hahaha
What on earth did I just watch? This was awesome.
I'm curious, where did you get those parameters for the low level setup? Reduced Write, marks where the hard drive starts to reduce the voltage sent to the heads while writing. Normally used as the cylinders and sectors get smaller and closer together towards the center of the platter. It needs to reduce the voltage so that the magnetic fields don't overlap from one cylinder to the next or from one sector to the next. But you're starting reduced write and Precomp at the very beginning, which I would think would make the outer tracks too weak to be reliable. Yet it seems to have worked. I'm very curious how you came up with this idea or where you learned it from. I have a couple of 5mb Tandon drives that just refuse to format properly. I may give this a try and see what happens.
You clearly know more about drive technology than I do, so I bow to your comments. I do not recall where I came across this information, but had suffered the frustration of not being able to format it so had gone looking for answers and this is what I found. Having tried it, I was very happy to see that my drive was now operational. I hope that you do get chance sometime to try it on your Tandon drives and can let us know how you get on. Kind regards, Ross.
Imagine how much storage they could fit on that size of hard drive now
Even on that PC, 5Mb is only 4 floppies. Of course that drive war around in the 360K drive period.
probably 25-100 Tb now
Oh boy
@@burg3r way more than that if you consider there’s probably at least 20x the volume as a smol little 3.5 inch drive and those can hold up to 18TB already
@@JordanShilkoff true yeah, i was thinking about game drives and shit, i didn’t even think about surveillance drives
Wow 5 MB. My first PC have an hard drive from 20 MB en that was a lot off space in 1984.
Wow, that's a long way to nowadays
A cheap hdd is 1tb or 1 024 000 mbytes
Person 1: wow that hard drive is massive! It must store loads of data!
Person 2: you bet, 5MB worth!
Person 1: wow if thats the size of a 5MB drive i wonder what a 5GB hard drive looks like!
Person 2: Oh I can show you but i am going to need a forklift....
Very true. 1Gb existed in 1984, weighed 500lbs
@@Tris289 Whats funny is that once upon a time a 5MD drive was the size of a washing machine, amazing how things have come.
@@Tris289 Seen a photo of that 1 GB drive near plane where they transported that thing around. Still curios about how Linus from LTT would drop it. Probably together with plane.
Forgot about the "park" command...
...good times
11:00 Ok, it's too small for the latest "real" DOS made in 1994. This drive is 14 years older than that, in 1980 there wasn't any DOS at all, first PC-DOS was released in 1981.
I feel like it should be used as a first bootable drive but with something around 1.0-3.3
That "VGA SWTICH" made me laugh.
Funnily enough, it still worked the way I hoped it would :-)
this channel needs your sub. do it.
I used to love to put old, discarded, pre-ide drives in my '286 and '386 on DOS 3.3... they were obsolete then so it's great to see people still playing with them today.
I thought i knew dos pretty well.... debug... then... oh....
C800:5
I have a WDXT-GEN2 in my 5150. The dynamic configuration is very nice as you can use it to set up drives that the controller would not normally support- like my 80MB ST-4096, or if you really wanted to push it, a Maxtor XT2190 which has a capacity of 156 megabytes.
Bring back such memories
That was my first hard disk. It ran very hot. I remember doing all those commands also. Brought back a lot of memories. Thanks.
I was surprised to see this work on a standard MFM controller that is made for the ST-412 and later drives. From my understanding, the ST-506 lacks buffered seek and has a step rate in the milliseconds and not microseconds. I was also surprised to see the much slower rotational speed of the platters compared to the ST-412. It's quite amazing that 5MB was thought of as huge back in 1980 when most floppy disk sizes were 120/160KB. Nice job getting her going!
Going back a few decades ago I was servicing and using computers that used the IDE Winchester drives. I remember the drives starting at 5MG. Then the larger ones of 10MG and then 20MG and then so-on kept coming available. These were all DOS computers.
Today, these computers and parts are all museum pieces!
Clean your screen ....paw prints are distracting lol
I need to have words with that cleaner lol.
I remember using a 286 at work, loading DOS from a floppy and then Lotus 1-2-3. When they got a computer with a hard drive like this, it was great! DOS and Lotus, right there in the machine! Cool!
Pure nostalgia- I did a few of those back in the day! It was always a big moment when you saw the C:\> prompt for the first time. Great video :)
10:52: Plain MS-DOS 6.22 came on three 1.44MB floppies, with compressed files, and if you expanded all those, you'd get up to 6.3MB. However some of those files you perhaps don't need, like Microsoft Backup and MS Antivirus, which are large: i.imgur.com/YCVUDU2.png You could maybe install DOS 6.22 somewhere else and then transfer just the good parts. If you really know what you're doing, you might even be able to install Drivespace on the 5MB HDD and ultimately get all of DOS 6.22 onto it. That would leave less room for applications though, and DOS 3.3 and earlier might be more period-accurate for this kind of HDD anyway.
5 megas HDD? huy, that is to MSDOS 1.0 or 2 version! Mine has 43 megas to MSDOS 5.0/6.20.
You can try with MSDOS 3.3 to that small HDD.
Nice video, greetings, I like the PC retro. :D
That is huge!!!!
I remember the first hard drive I ever bought and put into a PC.. the PC was a 8088, and the hard disk plus controller was about $750 or so. It was 40MB and the date was somewhere around 1991.
At the time, it was "super large". In today's money, that would be somewhere around $1400 .. Prior to that I was using 1.44 MB diskettes and 1.2 MB 5 1/4 floppy disks.. Prior to that, I was using cassette tape drives, yes, like audio cassettes.
HDDs till mid-nineties was definitely like premium/luxury items. Had an accident in workplace when improperly connected 250 MB Seagate IDE HDD circa 1993. Skewed connector by 1 pin row (those connectors hadn't plastic safety keys yet) and by turning on drive controlled exploded, leaving black spot instead of controller chip. Got few gray hairs too - disk price (240$) was 4 times above my monthly salary then. Luckily after 2 weeks found same model drive with bad platters but working controller. So drive was fixed and nobody knew.
Mmm.
A hope a company could fabric old tech hardware someday.
Did component level repair on these old boys and Microscience and Micropolis back in the late 80's early 90's, best test was using Novels Compsurf diagnostic and an amazing utility called Optune.
i also use an LG Flatron wide, really great panel
Ah god I was waiting for a video on st506 and st412 for like 3 years.
Ive had several Seagates fail on me. Never buying Seagate drive again. One of my external WD has been working flawlessly for a decade.
Thanks for this video 👍🏻👌🏻✌🏻
They weighed a ton cost a packet and loud as washing machine and where built like a tank like to the pc they were used in I remember skipping a load of them as they were worth nothing by then
They are worth a lot now. The price they go for on ebay is ridicules :O :)
"Grandfather of them all" only in the microcomputer sense.
Back then porn was still in paper ........🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Where on earth can you find new old stock drives like that?
Even finding used fully working examples of such drives is both expensive and/or next to impossible in my experience.
I have spent a lot of time over the years collecting vintage computer equipment. Just once in a while, you strike it lucky.
That 506 is in great shape. It must really be NOS.
Yep, certainly the first time it had ever been fired up. It won't be fired up again until it is ready to help someone restore their vintage machine that is waiting to use it. The Apple Profile for the Apple Lisa used a modified version of the ST-506, but I am struggling to find other systems that incorporated it. It pre-dated the IBM PC-XT, which used the 10mb Seagate ST-412. I believe that HP used it in some of their early systems, so will compile a list at some point.
@@mfhws The ProFile has the same HDA but different drive electronics. It's possible to swap the HDA with another and low-level format it using the ProFile's internal OS.
I remember SpinRite! When I was in uni in the early 1990s we'd run it occasionally on the lab machines as part of between-terms maintenance and setting the interleave sometimes had a massive improvement for a few of the machines, having been set too low. Your park command is fancier than the one I had. Mine just said "your PC is now ready to be moved."
lol I always thought it was the coolest program back when I would use it watching it build the map etc..
Fact this is a seagate drive and it works is amazing . They have the worst failure rate of any hard drives . Even the firecuda nvme drives are junk ,if you value your data I would not use anything made by seagate
Seagates MFM drives are potentially some of the most reliable hard drives in existence.
@@thegeforce6625 I’m talking modern drives . From early 2000 to present seagate are junk
@@BF4pawntard I’d change the timeline to mid-late 2000’s but I agree with you regardless. Todays Seagate stuff (except their enterprise drives) are crap compared to drives of 15-20 years ago.
@@thegeforce6625 agree the enterprise drives are a different class .
Format it on an RLL controller and get 10MB ;)
How did you configure the controller to work in the machine? I have a similar Pentium II era machine I am attempting to use an MFM controller in that will not work for anything - I have now tried 5 different controllers. Two DTC 5150CXs, a DTC 5150XL, a WD1003V and a WD1006V. I only have two left to test, another DTC 5150CX and a DTC 7287XL.
Any suggestions?
Did you disable the onboard ide controller?
Fragile? Must be Italian.
Great video, thank you.
Do those platters in chunky hdd resemble vinyl disc but just metal platter with magnetic needle used? I
mean precision of platters in that, data density, is it on par with vinyl record/disc?
Wow...and in new condition.
I used to have one of them in a donated IBM.
I presume from your comments that you did not keep it. 5Mb is not a whole lot of use today, but the nostalgia value is priceless.
I have one of these.
In a old 286 PC you could Format the HDD in the Bios. I have a 286 PC and a 20 MB MFM HDD and ist works 100%
5mb! that's alot... 4 floppies big infact!
From this one having only 5mb of storage space to current HDD ,SSD and m.2 drives having up to 16 tb of storage space and running at speeds up to 40GB/s
it's just amazing how far we have gone in terms of the drive's storage space and speed
Funny thing is that 5meg drive costs more (back in the day) than the 16tb of today. G=C800:5 !!!
default = 5 = 0 ; makes sense...
Well spotted. When setting the ccb option byte parameter, I did not have the drive specification or drive controller information on step rates, so I started at 0 and was going to work my way up to the recommended value of 5, or even the maximum of 7, if necessary. In the end, it worked with a value of 0, so I just left it at that.
i wonder if that drive size is still made for mainstream usage
Absolutely not. I assume your talking physical size and not capacity. Either way neither is still made.
Yeah, no way that form factor is still used. It's pretty amazing though. I'm reminded how amazing hard drives are though. They catch alot of flak today, but the reality is that they're a marvel of engineering, and it wasn't that long ago that they were still the fastest thing you could buy. and they still beat SSDs in terms of density and long term storage of data. This is a wonderful blast from the past though, and highly informative.
The full height 5 1/4 inch form factor was used until the very late 90s/early 2000 or so. The last drive to use it was the Seagate Elite 45GB enterprise drive. At the time, it was the highest capacity drive available.
Technology quickly got cheaper and denser after that, eliminating the need for such a massive drive.
It looks like you should have set the interleave to 4 instead of 3.
L'art de perdre son temps !
Vous avez un droit de passer votre temps comme vous le souhaitez lorsque vous êtes à la retraite
I am enjoying the German inscription on that Seagate HDD! Today, there are much more German speaking people in Europe, about 120 Million people! But sometimes no German descriptions on packages or products anymore! Very bad.
Without WW2 German would be lingua franca in Europe still today.
bubble memory ftw!
Hi, do you know, which was biggest cappacity MFM disk?
I had a 60 meg MFM at one time. That's the largest I've seen
160mb full height Maxtor I think.
This is what it feels like to run a computer with a damaged drive on a desktop.
I would think that a computer that is windows Xp capable not be called Vintage. Don't you think?
For instance: Max processor speed can be increased to at lease 650MHz - possibly higher using Pentium III slot one, on that machine. I know because I've got that exact machine. Judging from the POST screen.
POST screen may say 500MHz Max. But windows will know its true speed, also 768Mb Ram, and gForce 2 with 64Mb Vram. And, Out of the box it will see a Seagate 120Gb Hdd.
You really still think it a vintage PC?
The specification is not that important. Opinion differs on the subject, but vintage generally applies to anything more than 20 years old and less than 100 (which is considered antique). I accept that some consider 50 years to be the cut off, but I believe that they are in the minority. The Pentium II was launched in 1997, 24 years ago.
@@mfhws I beg to differ, but thanks. I will be sure to send you a message when I do finally shut mines down , It has been running for 14 years to date without shutting down. Unless for servicing Fans. I use it for a few games and playing music, and light office work. Starts in under 20 seconds, and has norton's system works 2006, MSO 2010, runs bjeweled 3 like any other system, dvd and mp4 playback is acceptable, I had added spare 2006 ATI all-in-wonder 256 MB, and pci usb 2.0 4-port, and pci sata 2-port upgrades. It's soul purpose is file and print serving, it has ethernet but no access to web.
Nice work on that MFM I hope to see more content when you up load them.
Any 20 year old item that stirs forgotten fuzzy feelings attracts words like vintage, and there was no better feeling than kissing the BSOD goodbye when upgrading to a rock-steady 440BX chipset Slot-1 motherboard and letting it push a Celeron 300A to 450 MHz on Win 98SE (with a GeForce 3 even). We were kings.
Bet it's still faster than anything Apple.
Let me introduce you to M1...
@@nickwallette6201 Uhm... it was 25% faster than a low end i5 and everything i7 and up completely destroyed the M1.
I wonder if it parks in parallel or serial?
retailing at 1,500 which is valued at around 5000 in todays money, this drive today would cost around 1000 USD per MB. could you imagine that pricing for current drives today? not even sure if entire countries could afford some of these HDD's we have now. 30TB being the largest...
How did you get a NOS ST-506..
What's the expression? It's not what you know it's who you know? I came to an arrangement with a friend and bought it from them.