The ST351A/X is my favorite drive (: Not the best sounding but I have a story with them and it's kinda cute, being the most modern drive with old stepper motor technology.

@@gennidee i like the sound of the stepper motor humming during the seektest, thats what makes this drive different from most other stepper motor drives. others dont have this low pitched of a motor.

@@XL-Tech this drive has a very unique sound and I dare say I would recognise it from its spin up sound alone even when in an enclosure ...

This is one of my favorites indeed (:

Thank you for your comment (:

Which Quantum 5 1/4 " drive do you compare it to?

@@gennidee mine is from a Macintosh II

U sure it is a 5 1/4 " drive then? As far as I'm informed quantums first 5 1/4 " drives were from the BigFoot series and these came on the market much later and were pretty silent in comparison.

@@gennidee search on google « Macintosh II inside » or something similar, you can see the big Quantum drive

@@gennidee it is a Quantum Q280

No actually this was the last stepper motor drive from Seagate that was still in production when almost every other manufacturer had moved on to using voice coil actuators instead. If I had to take a guess the first factory low level formatted drive from Seagate might be from the ST1xxA series. Not sure though. The ST157A is older than the ST351A/X. There is also a ST125A Version. As far as I'm aware it is not possible to actually low level format IDE drives in the BIOS because the drives controller just ignores it and performs a normal "erase" operation instead, hence not messing with the track and sector layout. Perhaps very early IDE drives like this one and the ST1xxA drives did not have this safety measure built in so it was possible to actually mess up the format of the disk so they put that sticker on it. But, as said, just guessing ...

Thank you for your comment. There is actually a dedicated version of Superstor that is specifically intended to be used with the ST351A/X only. That would be a nice addition. I have seen it on eBay for something like 10$ US or so but shipping to Germany would be too expensive to buy it just as a collector's item. Since I don't really use this drive the small size is not a concern to me.

I have a Kalok KL3100 in my collection which is acting up unfortunately. I made a video about it. You can check it out on my channel if you like.

@@gennidee Nice I have a pair of KL3120s, one with PCB issues. Think shorted capacitor across 12V line for the spindle motor controller but not sure. Hope to one day put them both on a Paradise RAID board and have a 240MB volume for Windows 95 on the suckers. What a sound that will make!

@@AiOinc1 that would be very geeky and cool at the same time (: maybe if it's just a shorted cap you can easily repair it.

It is not the best sounding stepper motor drive, that is true. Still one of my favorites (: I think I have 6 working ones by now and two dead ones.

@@gennidee What would the dead one sound like?

@@HexagonalPrism19 the same except rhythmic reading atttempts when a sector is not readable

@@gennidee Wanna see my hard drive collection? I am a new hard drive collector and I want to know if my collection is any good.

@@HexagonalPrism19 the JTS drive is really cool and rare. I hardly come across one on ebay and if one is for sale its pretty expensive (like most vintage drives)

That is a good question actually. I read somewhere the ST351A/X was the last stepper drive, but I don't have any info about the time period the Kalok was sold. Maybe the Kalok was produced later but the Seagate longer, making it the last drive?

Exactly. It triggers my nostalgia ^^ It's like a steam engine comparing to a modern combustion engine and EVs. Would not want to use them on my daily, though. I like the speed of an SSD and the quietness of modern harddrives (I have 3 HDDs in my computer and them being as loud as one of the vintage drives would be much of an annoyance ^^).

Exactly, SSDs are boring as hell.

Why's that? Don't get that reference ^^

It's because it sounds like someone ripping papers 😂

So that's what it is doing there (: I was wondering .... Thanks for the information!

@@gennidee you're welcome. Thanks for sharing the video about a stepper drive, I only remember them from MFM drives they sound a bit different than this seagate.

There were quite a few IDE drives with a stepper motor though. One of the most common is the Seagate ST157A. While built like a brick these are actually quite nice and not too sluggish either. Definitely more reliable than one of its contemporaries from KALOK as I had to experience myself unfortunately ^^

@@gennidee of course I just was unfortunate to not get them, sorry didn't mean they didn't exist :) I mostly got my hardware second hand and most people would keep hold of hard drives.

@@gentuxable Me, too. I used to get them from thrift stores back in the early 2000s. Had a lot of interesting drives back then but at the time they were considered junk so hardly one survived. They were either opened or resold when eBay started to become a thing. It was just until about 5 years ago when I started collecting them again and now they are much more rare and hard to acquire. EBay prices are mostly insane as well so it has kinda become like treasure hunting (: sometimes I get lucky and get one for cheap like the ST157A-1 last week that I got for 1,50€ + shipping. That one works perfectly. The ST351A/X from the other video about how I test my drives was expensive though. Bought it in a bundle with an ST352A for about 25€ from the US which is an ok price. Shipping and customs made this an expensive purchase though. But I wanted the ST352A because that is very rare (:

Do you mind me asking what a pancake servo is?

@@gennidee It's a flat brushless DC servo motor.

@douro20 I see, so the "pancake" is a reference to the form factor then ^^ Well I got the information, that the ST351A/X uses a stepper motor, from various sources on the Internet. I think it is even mentioned in the old data sheet that was hosted on the Seagate FTP server until a few years ago. But it might well be, that it is actually a servo motor. I have a dead ST351. I will try moving the motor by hand and see, if it rotates in steps or not. I presume a servo would rotate smoothly?

@@gennidee It would.

@@douro20I dug out my faulty ST351A/X today and rotating the motor with a finger I can feel that it has very fine steps, so I guess it's a genuine stepper motor then.

Actually an interesting thought ... Comparing how fast it boots as is (with an arbitrary distribution of the files after installing Win95 on a larger disk, deleting stuff until Win95 is small enough, cloning the partition and writing it on a smaller disk) vs. after defragmentation. Will do that probably, just for giggles ^^ Dunno if that'll make for a good video, though ... naah, gave this drive model enough exposure on my channel already (:

Probably not anywhere near 20x faster, and for the record defrag will also work in 95 as shown here so it could do it on it's own if wanted. Not to mention that there are not many machines out there capable of running 7 well that will also address this disk properly