this is my first time seeing truly ancient hard drives, what are these, wheres sata, wheres IDE. what is this place

The amount of dead linear voice coil Seagate drives is surprising to me, I thought those were pretty reliable drives. I wonder if there is any news on that Maxtor XT-1085 as I couldn't hear it try to do anything in the video except the spindle, perhaps the actuator lock is stuck on that one? As for the Lapine Titan, any updates on that one? It sounded not very happy trying to spin up, regardless it is a wonderful drive! Will there be follow-ups to these drives and which one's you were able to get working and which one's actually ended up bad?

Wow that really was a mixed bag, shame all of the voice coil Microscience drives need repair in order to work properly. The MiniScribe 3053 and 3085 are some of my favorite drives in there, I wish there was more of those around for sale but hard to find them for a good price.

Very interesting selection of drives and nice to hear them all power on! I wonder how many of them actually will end up working, I am really curious about that Magnetic Peripherals 94155-86, since I own one myself and my drive works flawlessly. The Mitsubishi MR535's are great to see and the Lapine Titan is a score!

The hp hard drive comes out of an HP 9153C and was called the "nighthawk". It uses a proprietary interface that seems to me to be half ATA and half ST-412. I have one but I have never messed with finding a way to do anything with it as they were a known unreliable drive when new and HP9153C computers are expensive.

Zentek was an actual manufacturer, and one of only two from Taiwan that I know of. Storage Newsletter had a short article about them back in 1990, and the same article mentioned Greenery Technology which was another Taiwanese startup from the same time period.

The ST2502N is most likely an Imprimis design, and built in the Oklahoma City plant. The HP drive is a Nighthawk drive, which has a proprietary interface- and were never very reliable from what I understand. They were used in HP 9153C external disk enclosures. Reconditioned 9153Cs sell for an ungodly amount of money.

Thanks! I'm tired of rain and thunder sounds. This is now my sleep music.

I have two of these. One fails the seek test with the stepper rapidly slamming to the end. My second one is the boot drive on my 286.

The biggest reason these 5146H drives are less common is because Quantum sued NEC over their use of a glass optical encoder (Quantum sued anyone that used an optical encoder for positioning).

Actuator mechanism sounds like a bad door hinge lol

Good stepper motor there

It's a shame about the Toshiba MK56FB, they are great drives. The MiniScribe 6000 series are also great drives, I have a 6053 that I bought for the face plate (it had so much dirt on it that it made your ST-238 look new) that ended up booting without any new bad sectors. I believe if MiniScribe had abandoned the stepper drives in lieu of their voice coil drives in the latter 1980's (and not committed fraud) they might have lasted well into the 1990's.

Those spindle bearings are some of the best I've ever heard from a 5.25" FH drive. That stepper motor sounds like it's underwater though, lol

I must say, this drive certainly *sounds* like a high quality drive in good condition: it's spindle bearings are very quiet, as is the stepper motor, especially during short seeks. The seek times themselves are also better than the equivalent CMI, Disctron, and Shugart drives from the era. Too bad the real-world reliability isn't there...

Tandon's manual lists the TM-502 as an 85ms seek time drive (with the fluid damper) which would have been just as fast as a ST-412, and faster than the MiniScribe 2012. I have never seen a Tandon that had the fluid damper still intact after all of these years, so perhaps that plays into the performance loss of these drives. The Tandon TM-500 series drives were the OEM drive for the Columbia data products MPC-1600-4 as well as many external hard drive enclosures (but not IBM, probably because they are difficult to fit into an XT's drive bay). The TM-500 series are among the easiest ST-412 class hard drives to service (especially head/platter swaps and stepper band replacements) and are in my opinion the best drives Tandon produced, however all Tandon drives were made to be cheap to manufacture and have just enough quality to be adequate in their function, so they are not a good choice of drive to use nowadays.

I actually had a TM502 at one point. It came out of the same industrial enclosure my TM100-2A floppy disk drive came from. I believe it was unused. Yeah they're terrible performers but at least they were better built than their later drives.

Tandon didn't get good until after Western Digital bought them...

Just found one of these in our basement, have no idea what to do with it lol

Those early Seagate ST-4000 drives seem to have a disturbingly high head crash rate (I have had 15 of them with head crashes on the servo platter) as well as servo board failures. For drives that were supposed to be better than the CMI drives they seem to have aged poorly.

you are the diskmaster 😎

These are really fun to watch, looking forward to next Wednesday!

The only Issue these drives have is that the stepper band is welded to the motor capstan (like the Rodime RO-200 series). This makes the drive nearly impossible to repair if the stepper band breaks or comes loose from the capstan.

very interesting stepper sound

This thing is so noisy that my speakers vibrated the tablet itself 😂

It is funny you say a "real Lapine", Kyocera made all of Lapine's drives, and got in legal troubles when they started slapping their own label on them. All of quantum's drives are prone to the sticky bumper syndrome (including the Q-2000, Q500, and Q-200 series) however the Q-500 is easy to repair if it has this issue.

A bit off-topic, I actually came into the U.S. from Canada with my dad on a semi truck! Staying for 5 days and I'm in the truck as I'm typing this comment! Unfortunately, I'm not going to Texas, But we may pick up a load from there, I just don't know.

I find those linear voice coil Seagates can get a bit grumpy after sitting for a while. Mine did that for a time and them after several tries it finally did a good seek test. Something to do with lubrication. The Mitsubishi drives seem common on the west coast when I see old computers gathered in a warehouse. My last remaining ST-225 has a speed issue and will not do a seek test as a result. Again disappointed that the second Magnetic Peripherals drive was also a dud. Mine spins up and will not not stop speeding up.

Looks like you are having some good luck with those Mitsubishi drives, not so much with the linear voice coil seagates so far though... Interesting how the one ST-251 that sounds really good does the extended seek test, but the two that sound like they have a head crash do the shorter one. I wonder how a LLF would go on these ones...

head 1 feels bad

These drives are more like a cross between a CMI CM-6426S and a MiniScribe 8425 in that they use an optical encoder with wedge servo (like the CM-6426S) and a rack and pinion setup almost identical to the 8425. I read that PTI got sued by quantum (for the same reason as CMI) and had to discontinue making these drives, which would explain their scarcity. It goes without saying that these drives are a pain in the rear to realign if the encoder gets out of sync with the actuator carriage (I used a dual channel oscilloscope, one channel for the encoder, one for the servo pulse).

I wonder if an low-level format would 'repair' this drive as it does seem to have some issues.

Isn't that just a tandon TM-262? I remember that western digital sold them under their name too.

Love these drives! I really like soft “squeak” it makes when seeking. And I’ve always found it super cool that the spindle on these has a lower-pitched tone more reminiscent of a 5.25” drive. Probably due to the fact that it essentially uses the same larger spindle that 5.25” drives did! This made for a very small available surface area on the platters.

The dead short Microscience 1050's shouldn't be too bad to fix (there is usually a group of 3 tantalums that will be bad, and they are fairly easy to find with an ohm meter). I think you found MiniScribe's long-lost bricks (the 8000 series bricks that is).

I know voice coil stuff isn’t what you prefer but the seektest of that MiniScribe 3085 really sounds so good! That ST-151 looks really strange without black paint. I hope we will get to hear at least one that works in the next episodes. That CMI that probably works sounds really nice and looks in good cosmetic condition too! Can’t wait for the next ones!

Magic smoke @ 4:00

I wasn't expecting to find this video that satisfying.

Sheesh, how rare are *good* Miniscribes?

Dope!

angry stepper boi

Head 0 not found. Abort, Retry, Ignore?

That ST4144R did not seek test properly. Very close. Mine did this for a bit, but I got it going again after putting it on a level table

Spinny rust: *y e s*

Fun watch! Looking forward to the next one. Really nice to see at least the second MR535 working for now, quite curious to see how many of those end up appearing in full if it's anything like these first two boxes.

The MiniScribe 8000 series drives often suffer from stiction (especially the ones used in macs and on hardcards) as well as hall effect sensor failure on the motors. They were decent drives when new (according to Redhill) but have failed to stand the test of time unfortunately.

I wish people from the discord picked the "all drives in one" option cause now we're going to wait a week in between each part, I wanna see the other ones! It would be nice if you tried to free up all the drives that did not spin up, but I guess that would be too much work for now. Hopefully the next boxes go a bit better than those two

My ST-4096 had a stuck head latch when I bought it but I power cycled it several times and managed to get it to unlock and it hasn't given me any trouble since. I use it in my 5150 with a WDXT-GEN2 with dynamic translation. It only has three bad sectors. I begin to wonder if those drives were designed by the team they acquired from Atasi?

Does the label have a year of manufacture on it?

I have the 15 MB version of this drive. The mechanism was in perfect condition with no bad sectors at all, but sadly the electronics suffered from leaking capacitors and I was unable to get it back into working order. :( You better check your drive for leaking capacitors before it is too late.