29 Jul
2005
29 Jul
'05
9:56 p.m.
On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 21:43 +0100, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
Repairing the drive only buys you time though - there will come a point
where working ST506 drives are next to impossible to get hold of. Being
able to understand the data at the signal level's the first step toward
being able to interpret and archive it - which is invaluable for
preserving machines where no good backup process exists, or install
media doesn't exist, or the disk controller is totally proprietary.
That's a secondary issue. Once you have something that looks like an
ST506 drive to any controller you care to name, and which stores the
bitstream in semicondcutor memory, you can then consider a server that
loads images from, say, a SCSI drive into that memory.
I think you're overthinking this. I can't see it being that hard to
adapt the mechanical bits of a different drive to a given set of
electronics. Come to that, I don't really see how it could be that hard
to repair ST506 drives, assuming they had not suffered a catastrophic
head crash. They were built in relatively dirty environments
compared to today's
clean rooms, out of bits that were very high precision *then* but pretty
crappy now. If I can walk into my local SKF or Timken stockist and pick
up the incredibly obscure bearings for my gearbox off the shelf, why not
a hard disk?
Because they were never sold presumably, unlike gearbox bearings.
Presumably there are parts of a hard disk that never left the factory
except in a complete drive.
Swapping electronics boards / repairing them's a bit more viable - but
it does just put off the inevitable...
Any machine's going to eventually fail due to natural chip destruction
(50 - 100 years?), but anything with a mechanical nature's probably
going to fail long before that.
cheers
Jules