Ah, yes, that ribbon cable connecting the PCBA to the spindle motor. I tried to get the mechanical engineering guy to do a spring finger contact but he thought they weren't reliable.
The startup sound of these is so so incredibly good. I picked up one of these a couple of years ago, but sadly it's fried. I really like spinning it up now and again though just for that wonderful startup! Really nice to hear this one :)
Everything is newer than my oldest Western Digital drives. Mine is the model based on the Tandon design with a stepper motor and inferior clip securement before WD went full voice coil and a proper gasket with screws.
That’s a nice collection you got there! That Caviar 140 appears to be the earliest produced unit I have seen yet. Also I really like the graphics you added in the side to match the drives!
I have a pretty sizeable collection of older WD, Conner, Seagate and Quantum drives but never owned any new. Were they always noisy like this or is it compounded by age of the bearings and other internal parts? These sound amazing by the way.
They where a little noisy when new, but not as noisy compared to today after however many thousands of hours of runtime. (Especially counting the spindle motor bearings)
I have some of those 5.25 drives as of 2024 and they do grumble a bit taken out of storage for a bit then quiet down. Particularly the ST-412. Never heard a Bigfoot with a loud bearing and I have a few of them.
I used to have a good working one. I sold it a couple of months ago along with the controller since I no longer needed it (an ST-4096 with a WDXT-GEN2 translating controller is in its place).
My Hard Drive Collection Video (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-B6vRU4qzXW4.htmlsi=ztqvG1ZgtswRibjm) shows the drive's parking mechanism in action at timestamp 5:18.
I burned my finger with a Seagate U series the same way, it got around 10000 degrees while spinning up and apart from a nasty blister i dropped it and it seized, later i found that i could unf*** it by dropping it on the opposite side
Nice video, this was really fun to watch. I'm wondering, do these drives actually work properly? Can you write to them and read from them without issues?
Finally, a collector who has an IBM 171MB disk, which I had with an Amiga 500 computer (with an additional external HDD controller). It was a really loud disk, with an additional sound effect - depending on which cylinders the heads were operating on, but perhaps the second problem with this additional noise is was the fault of a specific example. In any case, the drive performed well and was resold 3 years later. A year before the sale, it was replaced by WD Caviar 850MB, which I have kept to this day and is also featured in this film. As a former seller/servicer, I say that you should treat an HDD like an egg. How durable it will be depends on what micro-injuries and stronger impacts it will be exposed to before installation (on the way from the distributor to installation in the housing).
