to be fair to the IDE-XT drives, since I made that video I've come across four of the drives. One was a random find on a Goodwill shelf and three I found in PC's I acquired. I have yet to test the one found at Goodwill but of the other three, only one was dead. The other two fired right up. They do seem to be more common than I initially guessed. MY VTI 286 had this odd quark where it refused to boot to any other hard drive than the IDE-XT it came with. I tried multiple 16-bit ISA controller cards and SCSI cards and drives but no luck.

Stepper motors - the music of my ancient peoples.

Thanks for mentioning 'Ancient Electronics'. At first glance seems like another channel totally up my alley that I was not aware of until today.

0:04 sounds like an alarm straight out of interstellar

I remember having to PARK my heads. Does that mean I'm ancient? I think it does.

I still remember the drive parameters for the Seagate ST-351A/X, 666 cylinders, 4 heads, and 32 sectors per track. The BIOS in my 286 would lose its mind every once in a while and I would have to enter it manually to get the machine to boot!

Without fail, my favorite tech related YT channel. Always look forward to your videos sir. Thanks for all the hard work!

I appreciate the retro enthusiasts that try to keep these drives alive, I have a soft spot for retro hard drives like these!

we've come a long way in storage tech. I remember as a kid when I saw the first USB-Flash 128 MB drive and thought they it more than enough for me.

I have one of those long card IDE drives for an old amstrad, but not had any luck getting it to work on a more modern system to get data off of it. Such a pain!

Interesting info! Those old drives sound fantastic. Thank for the shout-out.

One of my laptops has such a drive in it but its a voice coil. Laptop from the late 80s. Was suprised it was IDE when I cracked it open upon it ariving at my house. Drive still works to this day. Did a lot of work getting it fully operational.

Love the scratchy sound, powerful stuff doing powerful and fast superuser things. (me in 1986) Now I love a silent SSD but I'm old.

The Amiga A590 also had a built-in SCSI interface. I use an old Mac drive in mine. The original drive was an XT HDD. Frozen solid.

Thanks for posting this, I've been looking all over for info on these drives. Long ago I used to have an '86 IBM PC XT 8088 with a 20 MB hard drive of this type. Based on the few videos I can find, I think it must have been a Tandon TM262 as it sounded exactly like your WD here, but predated WD's buyout of Tandon. Mine also developed a bearing fault after about 5 years that made the drive fail to spin up unless you gave the stepper motor some manual help (which I bet it hated). Really miss the sound of that thing. I can still hear the precise sequence of "chirps" the stepper motor would make during its power-on self test.

Kevin your videos run the entire spectrum from timely and helpful to obscure and obsolete but always entertaining! Also, it seems I know who to go to for "connectors" now....

Oh I was so happy when my first PC, an 286 AT clone in 1991 had an auto park hdd 😂

Seagate, Phoenix, jumpers, IDE, cards... I haven't seen any of those in over 20 years. Great memories assembling my own PC clones to sell to companies and people. Made a nice amount of money when I was single, awake, and desperate. Now everything fits on a chip. Technology is boring now.

This is all modern stuff. Back in 1991 my job was looking after systems that used SMD hard drives with 15" removable platters. They were 300MBytes though. I had to present a training course and people were asking "why are you using these old drives with voice coils? Modern drives use stepper motors." The answer was that PC drives weren't up to anything like the same capacity at that point.

I love computers but the 90's was not affordable for me to own one. I never heard of these or seen so again you blown my mind VWestlife. Thanks!

Miniscribe 40MB (as used by Philips Canada / HeadStart with an onboard interface) has the most impressive soundtrack though the 20MB seagate does sound very good as well.

The XT was my first serious pc, wonderful way to start learning about these critters 👍 it's oddly satisfying seeing this hw after 3 decades.

This prompted me to look up the known pinouts of XT-IDE and regular AT-IDE. The odd numbered pins are almost identical on both standards. But on the XT-IDE, the even numbered pins are all ground, and on the AT-IDE, it adds those extra bits. One would think there would have to be a way to make it work both ways with an adapter and not needing a switchable drive, but there would be translation circuitry needed definitely.

Interesting, I do remember their been issues getting IDE drives running in XT machines, it was something I was going to attempt, but never did.

Wow! Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I remember doing low-level formatting and am glad it's something I've left behind.

The intro startled the hell out of me. xD

That WD drive and others like it weren't really WD drives: they were rebadged holdover designs from Tandon after WD bought them out. Up until then and for a few years after, WD built drive interface and video controller chips before selling off the semiconductor side of the house to focus on hard drives instead. Their first real in-house WD hard drive was probably the WDAC280, an 80MB 3.5" ATA drive that introduced the familiar Caviar name and designs that people knew from the early '90s.

I'm surprised they still made them until 1994, surprising since things used to move so fast back then, but then I remember seeing XT's used as cash registers and other "controller" applications until the late 90's. Gamers are really at the cutting edge, I tend to forget that alot. (You got a lot of knawwledge my man, you must read lots of books! Tai and his Lambo would be proud) Glad someone makes these "legacy" vids, even better when it's fun to watch...

I had one of those wD drives that stopped working (way back in the late 90’s). Figured I had nothing to lose, so I popped the clips, took the top off and gave the head assy a nudge. Started working again, and never failed 🤣 In 92, my mom gave me a packard bell 8088 fir my birthday with an 80mb wD caviar in it with an 8 bit interface card (might have been a wD, but cannot remember). Transferred both it and the hdd to a Tandy 1000tx later on, then the hdd itself to a 486 with a 16 bit isa card.

A while back I came across a forum thread and a few web pages where people were trying to connect CF Cards to XTA directly using the not-widely-known CF 8-bit mode specified in the standard. If I remember correctly, one person pulled it off by using the XT-IDE BIOS with a modified CF-to-IDE adapter.

IDE just means the adapter board is attached to the hard disk drive frame instead of being a card in an ISA slot. The 40 pin connector is neither IDE or ATA, it's a pin reduced ISA bus connector. ATA is a protocol. Optical drives that connect to the 40 pin ISA connector use the ATAPI protocol on top of the ATA protocol, or rather, it is a Packet Interface extension to it. PCI "IDE" is more accurately PCI ATA.

Wow those incredible noises bring back memories!

I had an ST351A/X around 2007-2008 I pulled out of a 386 on the side of the road. Should have taken the whole machine. Used the drive for various things including my first real forays into the realm of MS-DOS networking fun. These days it lives in a Tandy 1000 not much unlike yours in Missouri but partitioned for 20MB because there's bad sectors in the middle of the other half, and the owner wants to play it safe.

I remember my sound blaster cards. I think I still have them. Best sound ever.

Startup beeps, flashing activity lights and the sounds of spinning hard drives.

0:20 Aaaah! I have one of those WD hard drives! I never ever knew it was 8-bit until now! Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get it to work with my vintage computers!

Very interesting, and I was really surprised to see the defects listed on that Western Digital drive; would they be shipped new from the factory with those defects due to poor yields, or maybe these were refurbished drives resold cheaply?

Seagate did have bad sectors but mapped in replacement sectors in ROM. Sometimes you could format a drive and always at the same point it would skip to the spare sector and back again. This is why you should not do a true low level format because it would wipe the ROM table of bad sectors and try to create a new table. The original table being mode accurate as it was created with diagnostics. Seagate bought out CDC or Control Data Corp. to teach them how to make reliable disk drives.

6:05 I've seen those referenced as ESDI but its interesting to know they're actually an IDE like interface

A friend of mine had a portable PC XT with a hard drive like this. It sounded like a starting airplane 😁

Glorious start up sounds

15:34 - I recently had one of these - that stepper motor actually worked, it was the drive motor that had thrown a bearing or something - it sounded like a grinder. I opened it up and found shavings all over, yet I was still able to pull a DIR command on it.

I have a Commodore Colt that I installed a Seagate ST351 A/X in. I had to install a newer BIOS before I could see the full 40MB, but it works very reliably. I should probably keep an eye out for another in case this on dies.

Very interesting! I used the same debug command on my MFM controller. It's amazing the level of engagement that was required of users in the 8-bit PC era.

0:04 *starts vibin*

Excellent video!! Thanks for covering this.

I'm glad you made this video! I've regularly heard things about IDE-XT, but I've never had an opportunity to use a drive equipped with it and I've never really learned what the differences were (until now).

I'm happy with the SSD. But this is interesting.

It's funny how seagate and western digital essentially switched roles in being reliable and unreliable

And if ya didn't know............... Now ya know! You are a guru of old tech.. Thanks for being you! :) I do remember back then 20 and 40 megabyte drives seemed YUGE.. We have come far!

Nice a new video very interesting. Love theses kind of videos. Have a nice week Kevin.

I used these back when new, 20MB, man thought I had room for days..it was a big step up from 10! Now I sit here with 100TB thinking that's not enough! From about 1983 to 2005, I used to work on computers...now I'm a happy end user. I used to have a garage full of old computer pieces and parts along with full machines such as the PS/1 mentioned in this video and tons of software....when I moved I hauled it all to the dump...little did I know a few years later all that junk turned to gold! Oh, well.... ~Jack, VEG

I had a WD drive that looked exactly like the ones in the video- big fat tall ones that seems to have the metal shaped around the platter area. It was 43MB. But it was in a 286 and was attached to a 16-bit controller, so I guess it wasn't one of these special drives.

10:35 That typeface is so pleasant looking.

I had Commodore A590 with 20MB XT drive. It was slow, loud and got really warm after hours of normal use. A590 have SCSI controller onboard so I upgraded to a 540MB SCSI and my Amiga 500 got really fast booting.

0:04 Master Caution alarm

You mention wanting to put a soundblaster card in that Tandy 1000 -- it might actually come equipped with a (mono only/8 bit) sound chip already! The drivers are out there to make it roughly SB compatible!

Best hard drive spin up noise I ever heard was in an IBM PS/2 model 80 tower we had. It sounded like a ball bearing would drop (and bounce a bit). Never heard anything like it.

i see that these old computers weren't effected by the Y2K bug as much as they were wanting us to believe back at the time

Holy crap, this is an interface I've never heard of. Thanks for the informative video! =)

that seek sound is awesome..

I Really Love That 8-bit Sound

Heh, the CompuAdd 810 I got from you is the whole reason I have an 8-bit IDE drive

What about 16 bit MFM controllers? :)

That start up beep is very harsh-sounding

amazing video

Some of the first XTA drives (as well as ATA and some of the ESDI) were mechanically pretty much MFM/RLL drives equipped with redesigned boards. Why waste a crapload of mehanically sound mecahnisms that had already been produced? That can readily be told by them containing a bulky stepper motor and metal strip drive for the heads, with similar looks to one you'd find on a 5,25 inch floppy drive. The voice coil style head movement was already available in the early 90's ATA drives. I have a 40MB Miniscrbe drive which appears to be XTA, with the voice coil mechanism, and I have an Amiga HDD controller that has the option for XTA or SCSI. The latter style of drive is obviously far easier to obtain. Why I think the Miniscribe is XTA, is that it lacks the master/slave jumper, which I haven't failed to find on any functional ATA drive I have encountered, and also it appears that there is some different life to the drive when connected to the Amiga controller, compared to being connected to a newer PC board. Kinda like it was trying to do something, but it never detects as a configurable drive. EDIT: Maybe the reset signal polarity is the culprit, hope I can find a way to alter it. The autopark feature appears to be inherent to the voice coil head movement, it travels home when not powered, but the stepper motor movement does not do it.

I might even have one of these in my Juko Nest V 30 - I'll have to put one in an AT machine and see what it does.

I have a single IDE XT hard drive in a Tandy laptop - I think it uses a high density connector as well, which is another annoyance. There's some other funky drive in a Zenith laptop I have, but I can't remember if its 8 bit IDE or just a really funky MFM physical interface

Cool

I had a few XT computers with the XT hard drive. They were expensive and kind of slow, but much better than 5 1/4 disks. They took a while to spin up. I really miss the days of old XT and AT computers. Ah, those were the days.

I have one of those Western Digital stepper drives that doesn't want to work. All I have to do is tap the side of the computer with my palm when turning it on. I just need to break the stiction of the bearings enough for the motor to start moving.

love the sounds!

Those hard drive sounds were truly terrifying. Imagine hearing a modern HDD make those sounds. 😳

so can you up grade IDE-XT drive, to something which is not nearly 40 years old? are there any adapters made or being made for this interface, maybe involving "RASBBERY PIE" emulating a drive or something in or is finding a 40 year, one stock drive the only solution at the moment?

I seriously miss stepper-drive HDDs. Yeah, slow as molasses but the sound they made was just divine.

I have that same st351 in my arcade machine for game save data. makes the same sounds and everything Its only like 30mb or whatever but it still works fine. You know its doing it's job and working from how loud it is. Had no idea it was that old but I checked and the thing is at least from 1989. Surprised its still working and under windows10 thats nuts! It came out of this compaq portableIII I had a few years ago, old lunchbox type thing with a hellishly red screen. Any idea if I need to worry about parking on these?

Awesome :D

ah, and for a lifetime, I always worried I needed to park the drive.........

12:18 sounds like when you accelerate in a golf cart and then slightly let your foot off the gas.

I love the noises of these XT drives. :)

I remember using low-level formatting tricks to squeeze an extra megabyte out of my expensive new 5-meg drive. The tricks increased access times, but just maybe all that extra space would be enough to write the self-improving AI program I'd been thinking about. Good times.

I remember how my dad was learning about IBM PCs before getting one, which would be a Commodore Colt (an XT computer). My dad was educated by computer-savvy people, including the employees at computer stores. PCs were more complex to operate than TRS-80s, Commodore VIC-20 and 64s, Apples and other such home computers. When he got an HDD for the Colt, it sure made a difference in loading and saving, compared to using a floppy drive. I wonder if it could be one of those IDE-XTs. The '90s were interesting times in getting those complex PCs to work right. My dad and I even taught people we know how to operate such things, as well as installing HDDs (maybe IDE-XTs, unless they were used on ATs). Then there came a time when I showed my dad some things that he couldn't figure out. That would make me decide to go back to college and get a Bachelor's Degree on some computer stuff. But that's another story.

Darude on 8 floppy's.

PC Tools? Interesting, looks very much like Norton Utilities. The custom characters are a blast from the past, the last hurrah to make text mode programs a bit more attractive before Windows has become commonplace. Sadly, reprogrammed characters did not work in a DOS window. EDIT: I see in another comment that you used Norton SysInfo and PC Tools SI.

Neat. I didn't know c800:5 was also used on XT IDE. Last time I used that was in 1994 when I messed with an MFM. Got that sucker to take 1:1 interleave though!

Hey! I have a 20MB drive mounted on 8bit card on my 'new' Tandy SL/2. I'd like to try oiling the thing up and see if I get lucky since it only make some single TIK sounds every once and then. Any common oil I can try? I can see the drive size after couple of errors in Deskmate but that's it :(

I worked for Seagate in Scotland back in the day great company to work for, those were the days.

are there any sound cards that have interface for those hard drives,, like the sound cards with interfaces for cdrom drives .. ?

Was that Seagate 20 MB hard drive originally in your Tandy 1000RL? I think you showed it starting up in your RL, didn't you? Just how loud is the spindle motor? It sounded very loud in the video, did you just set the microphone volume level quite high?

5:06 Now I wonder do you have any hardcards in your collection? Seems you have quite a bit of collection of old HDDs.

You flashed on the Minscribe @5:22 with it's unique card and power source. I have a Miniscribe 8425 that didn't use the power from the card (didn't have one anyways) but needed the molex power from the MB. I don't understand why these cards have two ribbons? Can these cards have adapters for the other 8 bit HD's mentioned or would you need another card?

I still have two of these drives in one of my drawers. They were pulled from an IBM PS/1 I owned in 1991. Pretty sure they haven't been spun up since at least 1993. I'm tempted, though sounds like it would take me a while to get all the necessary hardware, and there likely isn't anything worthwhile on them other than book reports and my early foyers into Sim City, Civilization, RRT and my attempts at hacking Dune II so I could spawn Devastators for free.

I used RLL back in the day.

You can also format AT IDE drives of that vintage. Most mainboard BIOSes had a hard drive format utility built in, accessible next to the BIOS setup. The warning about "never low-levelling" is not dependent on the XT or AT interface, but low-level formatting might be problematic on disks with virtual geometries, even your 20MB with translation. As a counter-point, the Fujitsu M262 series (www.bitsavers.org/pdf/fujitsu/_brochures/M2622_2623_2624_S_F_H_T_Brochure_1991.pdf), which comes with ATA or SCSI interface, and does not just geometry translation, but also already uses four zones of different density can be low-level formatted, and actually *needs* a low level format after a rough transport. I experienced this both with a M2624T (AT) and a M2622F (SCSI) drive: After rough handling, the drive issues sporadic "sector not found" errors, that can be fixed completely by reformatting it. These drives have a "servo surface" on one of their four to six platters (yielding 7, 9 or 11 data surfaces), and rough handling seems to misalign the platters against each other.

i still have IBM PS1 2011 has 30 meg hard drive

Any ideas for a good replacement hard drive (and maybe controller?) on a Tandy 1400HD?

At 207 kB/s this wasn't much faster than a 1x CD-ROM drive and it even had less storage space!

Wow those hold a whopping 20 MEGABYTES!!

At the end that hard drive sounds like a car with very bad brakes