Massive lot of vintage hard drives

The Great Vintage Disk Drive Jubilee!! I have a friend in town (Shrikant Desai, some of you may have seen his talk at VCFX last year) who has a huge collection of vintage to modern disk drives, including floppy and hard, magnetic and optical, 14", 8", 5.25", 3.5", 2", etc. His collection of drives numbers in the hundreds, possibly breaking the 1,000 barrier (everytime I turn a corner at his house I find a new stash, and he has other stashes around town). His informal goal was to create a comprehensive archive of every drive ever made. He thinks he has attained about 60% of that goal. There is definitely overlap and duplicate units.B Alas, Shrikant is getting on in years and no longer has the time or energy to maintain the collection. We had been trying to jointly start a computer museum in town to feature a conglomeration of my and his collections, but because of time and budgetary constraints we reluctantly abandoned the idea (for now at least). So Shrikant has decided to divest himself of his drive collection. The collection was a typical pack-rat pursuit, borne out of intellectual curiosity as well as an inherent urge to archive stuff for posterity. Shrikant has worked for almost every disk drive manufacturer from the 1960s through to current day in one form or another. For example, back in the 1970s and 1980s he was Directory of Technology Development at Shugart. The Computer History Museum already came out and took a few boxes of materials away (mostly documentation) so we're left with a huge pile of metal. Shrikant asked me to help disburse the remainder. At first I was thinking purely scrap, as my mindset these days is hued by my electronic recycling business (don't worry, nothing vintage/classic gets scrapped) and a great majority of the collection is modernish drives (MFM and IDE) but then I started to realize these are drives that other collectors may find useful to get or keep their vintage systems running, especially the older and rarer ones. If it hadn't been for the trouble I had trying to find a working ST-225 for an IBM PC 5150 I put together recently for a project I may not have given this the consideration it deserves. I came to the realization that it's hard to find working vintage hard drives these days, which is kind of a "duh" realization since that's pretty much a given. So, in the interest of helping both Shrikant and fellow collectors, I decided it would serve everyone's interest to offer the drives up for sale. I've set up a special request form here: http://www.vintage.org/special/2008/diskdrive.php On this form you are asked to enter your name, e-mail address, the drive(s) you are seeking, and the price you are willing to pay. The way this will work is we will give time for people to submit requests, say a couple weeks, then we're going to start going through the drives and identifying ones that have been requested. We'll try to determine if the drive is good or not using simple tests (i.e. visual inspection, shaking, and other highly technical considerations), but this will by no means guarantee the drive is working. This will be an "as-is" sale, so make your offer accordingly. We are not seeking huge sums here, just enough to cover time. If you want a known good drive, please note this in the request and make sure your offer takes into consideration the time and skill required to find a proper host machine, hook everything together, then run diagnostics, etc. It took me 22 hours to build the 5150 referenced above, a large portion of which was spent locating, testing, and troubleshooting a working ST-225. If you want to pay only $20 for a known working hard drive, that's not going to fly. Really, all I want to do is find the drive you're looking for, package it, then ship it to you. If you want a known good drive, we will have to discuss it as a consulting project, and I'm not cheap (and niether is Shrikant). Also, between you, I, and the mailing list, Shrikant could really use the money right now. Shipping costs (actual, via Fedex Ground) will be added to your offer. We will need to collect from you before we ship out the drive. PayPal is best, checks sent to me are fine. We'll discuss the details further when the time comes. The reason I want you to use the form and not to e-mail me a request is because my inbox already has 1,500 mostly unanswered e-mails in it and I tend to "lose" messages amid the deluge (I periodically try to knock down the backlog and at one point had it down to less than 1,200 but it has gained on me in recent weeks). So it would behoove you to use the form to make your request since that will be easier for me to manage and track. Do feel free to e-mail me directly if you have a question that can't be entered into the form but please keep in mind that I'm so busy these days I might not be able to respond right away. PLEASE NOTE: I do not follow the CC list regularly. I am subscribed but have delivery turned off. I scan the archives periodically to see what's being discussed but don't have time to actively participate. That being said, please send any relevant replies or inquiries to me directly, not to the list, or else there's a good chance I won't read it. Lastly, I'm sure I'm missing some details or something, so I'll follow up once I've had a number of people e-mail me asking me for obvious information that I've neglected to include here. Thanks! -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]