30 May
2006
30 May
'06
3:13 p.m.
They will
become harder and harder to find and keep working. If you are
trying to keep the
old systems running, you will eventually have to do a
dongle of some sort with newer drives. Why not now?
Keeping the old drives working is going to require parts and technology =
that
don't exist commercially any more. You can still find the high volume circuitry in the surplus stores. But it's the
heads and platters that =
wear
out and ferrite heads and oxide media are gone. Occasional bits and
True. But other problems inside the HDA would be much easier to repair on
an older drive with a much larger head flying height. I think it would be
possible to make a 'clean box' to open up ST412s at home and repair them
and expect the repaired HDA to be reliable enough to use. That is not the
case with modern drives.
=
pieces
show up less and less often. Why not put the energy into adapting the
latest drive technology? That buys you an extra decade or so.=20
Becasue by the time I've designed and debugged the interface, the darn
drive I've chosen will be discontinued!
IDE drives are going to be around in far greater
volumes long after the =
last
ST506 is still working. I just had a report that last year was the =
I am not convinced of that, actually....
biggest
year ever for hard drives: 376 million units, the huge majority IDE. =
That
gives a pool of drives to use that will outlast most of us on this list.
And there are already IDE to SATA dongles to stretch out another =
generation.
And there are the side issues to keeping the old systems going. How =
long
will we be able to find 8" and 5.25" media? Printer ribbons? Rubber =
parts
for teletypes and typewriters? When do you toss in the towel on trying =
Rubber parts may not be a problem. There are 2-pack synthetic 'rubbers'
made, e.g. by Devcon. The data sheet I've seen actually says they can be
used to make rubber rollers.
OK, you'd have to make a mould, but that's not beyond a good home
workshop. And once you've done that you can turn out as many parts as you
need. I might actually be doing this in the next year or so to make a
roller for an old calculator printer.
-tony