Old hard drives

TidBITS Talk
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Continuing the discussion from Seagate Ships 30 TB Hard Drives for $600:

If you had a SCSI drive (what a Mac would need), then it would be a different model. Seagate’s naming scheme at the time was:

  • First digit - form factor
    • 1 = 3.5"
    • 2 = half-height 5.25"
    • 4 = full-height 5.25"
  • Next digits = unformatted capacity. In this case, 38 MB formats to about 33MB
  • Suffix - interface
    • Nothing indicates MFM using the old ST-506 interface
    • R = RLL using the ST-506 interface
    • N = 8-bit (narrow) SCSI
    • W = 16-bit (wide) SCSI
    • A = ATAPI / IDE
    • And others

So, whatever drive you used would have had an “N” suffix.

Skimming through the massive list of models at Stason, it is likely that your drive was a ST-138N, which is a 3.5" 32MB SCSI-1 drive.

The 238R (what my college was selling for PCs to use) was a 5.25" half-height drive with an RLL-based ST-506 interface.

And yes, they were loud and slow by today’s standards. But we loved them because they were so much better than floppy disks.

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Yep. My first computer (a TRS-80 CoCo) used cassette tapes for storage.

When I got my next computer, an Apple //c, those dual 140K 5.25" floppy drives seemed like nothing short of a miracle.

My first PC (a homebrew 8088 PC-XT clone) originally had two 5.25" 360K floppy drives. When 3.5" 1.44M drives became available, I bought two of them, along with a funky controller card that allowed me to use all four drives at once.

With 2.88 MB on line (a disk in each of the 3.5" drives), I was able to run a small BBS on that computer. Although the software publisher refused to support (or even sell me a license) a system without a hard drive, I found that it worked rather well, for a text-only (no file-download section) BBS.

But that first hard drive, 80MB and a 28ms seek time, seemed like heaven on Earth. It seemed that I could just save everything in the world to it and it would never fill up.

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Wow! Those were my first two computers as well! Was your CoCo the original with the chiclet keys, or the second version with a more standard keyboard? Mine was the original. (Actually, I still have it in a closet upstairs. The //c also.)

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I used to have a multi-user Cromix system with a Z80 and 256k of ram. My hard drive was 5MB and cost about $3,000! The interface was called WDI all on an S100 bus. I trained my secretary to use my home computer from work via modem to do pricing for contracts using DBaseII in the early 1980s. Now an early Mac Studio having started with a 512k Mac around the same time as my Cromix system.

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It was a CoCo I (chicket keys). Rev E motherboard with 16K RAM. I purchased an Extended BASIC ROM a year later and installed it myself - my first computer upgrade :slight_smile: .

That computer still exists, in a closet at my parents’ house. It probably works, but I’m pretty sure that all my tapes have been lost by now, and I don’t have a working cassette player at this point either.

I have, however, read about people using phones and laptop computers as a storage device. Get a USB audio interface and hook it up to the cassette port. Capturing and playing the audio (e.g., with Audacity) works great. Of course it is kind of silly using a computer that is many orders of magnitude more powerful as a storage device.

My //c (and a IIGS I bought later) are both in my home. I haven’t turned them on for a while, but they worked the last time I tried.

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Oooh! Computing nostalgia!

In the early to mid-eighties I was working as a typesetter on a Varityper Epics system. I’m guessing it was pretty state of the art because in its filing cabinet it held multiple 68000s and drives (20M Shugarts, maybe?). We had three specialized typesetting keyboard terminals connected to it. It was great and would work fine even now. But what I remember with particular fondness is the sound of the drives. You knew things were working correctly by the sound of the chatter. After months you’d start to understand the subtleties of the language and it was very useful.

I find myself dismayed by SSD’s because you can’t hear them. :slightly_smiling_face: How’m I going to sense (not paw around in some arcane utility) if some random process has run amok?

That said, I quite enjoy my silent MacMini and external SSDs. Kinda fast they are. . . .

Dave

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Indeed! Sound was a useful troubleshooting tool! The silence of modern machines definitely counts as progress, but sometimes I miss the hums and whirs of my old machines.

sttngrelics
sttngrelics800×602 205 KB

(From the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Relics”.)

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Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I was rocking a BBC Master 128 (made by Acorn Computers, who’d later create the first interation of the Advanced RISC Machine, ARM…) here in the UK, a 6502 co-processor module (meaning I could play the enhanced version of Elite) and a 20MB Winchester drive! I got pretty good at hacking cassette-based software to run from the hard drive, and had a nice little software library on there plus room for offline messages collected via dial-up modem connection to BBSes and online services. :nerd_face:

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Ah, but it wasn’t a SCSI drive until I added a SCSI controller card. It was ST-506—that sounds right now that I say it out loud too. I remember building it from those parts saved a ton of money over a true SCSI drive.

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