19 Feb
2019
19 Feb
'19
4 p.m.
> One of the moxt common causes of a terrible
ear-piercing high whine is the
> spindle contact. Many old drives had a springy piece that rubbed against
> the end of the spindle. Over time, it would wear a divot, polish that,
> and start to squeal. A very light pressure on it would test that
> hypothesis. Not enough pressure to muffle the sound, and certaianly not
> enough pressure to slow the spindle! Or, pulling up on it, away from the
> spindle. Some people claimed that you could just rip it off. Don't.
> Best is to twist it very slightly sideways, so that it can start wearing a
> new divot.
On Tue, 19 Feb 2019, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
It was a 3?" EIDE drive. 8GB one, I think, but
might have been
smaller. I didn't want to open it to do that, although there was a
time when custom PC builders "de-lidded" hard disks and fitted them
with little acrylic windows so you could see the head move. Not sure
I'd want to trust my data to that...
Yes.
I was thinking in terms of slightly older drives than that, particularly
5.25"
Getting at the slider on newer drives wouldn't be practical.
Well, there
don't seem to be many 350 RAMAC disks still running.
(I'm trying to decide what to use as a base to make a patio table out of a
[crashed] RAMAC 24" platter)
Conceded.
And thank you for the reminder that I'm not old yet. My first machine with a hard disk was my work PC in my
first job: an
IBM PC-AT, with a 20 MB FS/FH 5?" ST-506 drive, probably a Seagate
ST-4026. I added a second drive to the machine, a 15 MB one, and put
Xenix/286 on it.
You could run Xenix on an XT!
The stock IBM XT HDD controller (Xebec) had physical solder pads for drive
type, and supported 5MB, 10MB, 15MB, and 25MB drives. The 25 was, of
course, best (if you could get one) and would permit a 10MB DOS partition
dual booting with 15MB Xenix. Was that the first "dual boot" in the
PC world? (or was there a CP/M-86 dual boot option once they added HDD
support?)
A few years ago I bought a surplus 2?" 1 TB drive
from a chap who'd
bought a new notebook and put an SSD in it before use. So, 2nd hand
but unused.
It cost me CzK 1000, about ?30 at the time.
?30 for a terabyte. I was in a state of shock. It was so tiny, too.
I found an online capacity comparator thing.
I used a lot of ST4096 drives. Needed a second AT power supply for the
second one.
You'd need a pile of those Seagate drives the size
of a _space
shuttle_ to hold a terabyte.
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/53353.html
I use 2TB 2.5" 7.5mm Seagate/Samsung drives for MP4s of movies in
laptops and with a Seagate GoFlex-TV (media streamer with SATA slot)
But, I finally filled 2TB
Currently, that is the largest 7.5mm 2.5" drive available. But SSDs are
now available in 2TB, so when that price comes down, . . .
Heard about the NSA Utah Data Center?
https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
That's a LottaBytes!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com