ST-506 hard drive emulation - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

30 Jul 2005

...
 From: "Gordon JC Pearce" <gordon at
gjcp.net>

Tony Duell wrote:

 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. 
Hi
 I have several that were destroyed by someone mecahnically
rotating the media backwards. The trailing edge of the heads
have a razor sharp edge that will dig into the media. Units
without the brake can be damaged by handling as well. The
danger is reduced if the heads are parked since the linear
shift is smaller for a given amount of rotation but how many
systems actually park the drives before powering off or
even have a park for a person to use before transport.
 Of all the units I've collected over the years ( less than
10 I'll admit ) the most comon failure was a surface failure.
Dwight

...

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?

Gordon.