I didn't realize it was a remake an an older video before I read the description though I thought the top cover looked similar. 3600RPM uh? That's really wierd for a modern drive
ok guys, thats it. the oddest drive, with 3600rpm in 3,5" form factor in 2008 and with fluid bearings. That being said I would love to have a NAS of such slow spinning drives.
To think I thought WD's latest 4,800 RPM 2.5"s exclusive to some external drives (namely the FBLite 2 and Spyglass 3 platforms) was outrageous enough... It's funny that modern Fujitsus are now never made below 7,200 RPM ever since the MD04-V. I wonder if it'll ever return or if the Toshitachi HDA has truly taken over that niche (side note, replace the MD04-V already! Who wants a four-plat drive in this era?)
4,800 RPM is straight up bizarre, although it really fits into the weirdness with this featured drive too. It is truly ironic how all of Fujitsu's developments are squarely stuck at 7,200 now.. I certainly hope we'll see a lower RPM return one day, but oh boy Toshiba are the pinnacle of dragging their feet it seems. Good lord, the MD04-V is certainly a sight for the current day.
Nice Fujitsu. Never knew they made AV drives. that one has a very low spindle speed compared to drives of today. I didn't know they made consumer grade desktop drives with that low of a speed. Its quiet as well! I have a question. AV drives, like ones in DVRs,etc is it true that those drives are programmed in the firmware to not retry on errors? I used to find DVRs that people threw out (Dish and Tivo, etc) that had AV drives in them and i used them in a computer only to find out later that they started growing bad sectors to the point that the drive was unusable. Was it because i used an AV drive inside of a PC where its not meant to be used? It was the maxtor quickviews and the seagate CE model drives (SATA and IDE).
Yeah, these are quite strange all in all. It's a shame Fujitsu's consumer 3.5" division never returned, but I suppose we can thank Toshiba for bringing it back in some sense in the modern day. I can't say I'm too familiar with error correction behaviour on most AV-spec drives (I tend to let them sit in devices until they disappear from active service many years past their use-by dates), but many older units from the IDE-era didn't offer huge differences compared to their desktop counterparts. Of course, when dealing with modern-day stuff it's a touch less cut and dry. For example though, I'd totally be cool with using these G1 AV's in a desktop system! Although, that super slow RPM & overall performance for today would certainly set it back a bit. Not that I'm familiar with the ins and outs of their firmware either!
Generally the AV drives have little to no difference in behavior during normal operation, but they tend to support additional features (like the streaming command set) that can be used to *optionally* reduce error correction effort in cases where it's appropriate to do so.
For 3.5" FDB-motor drives, this is probably the only one (at least to most documentation out there). Of course, before the 2000's there were many 3600 RPM drives, but there was little reason for it in the 2010's which makes this one so strange. It's still hard to believe! At least it runs cool...
I recently got two of these - one survived shipping, the other did not, so I opened up the dead one. It's a very conventional ramp-load design nearly indistinguishable from a WD or whatever of the time. There is indeed one disk and two heads, but with space for up to three disks (was Fujitsu planning a 1TB model?).
Ahh incredible, thanks for confirming! Shame one didn't survive, but it's really cool to finally have that confirmed. Would've been interesting to see them get to 1TB! Out of curiosity, were those two also imported from Japan? Would be very shocked to hear that they're from anywhere else.
@@bigbluebananabread Yep, they came from Japan via an eBay seller over there - I don't mind too much that one was dead, both because of how I was finally able to see inside and also because the listing wasn't clear whether I was buying one or two in the first place. The price was right for one anyway. I was also talking to someone elsewhere about these, and he made an interesting observation about the PCB that I was able to confirm on mine - the 12V pins from the power connector go nowhere, with the spindle motor running from 5V like a laptop drive. I plugged the working one into a bus-powered USB to SATA adapter (the kind that normally only works with 2.5" drives) and it spun up just fine.
@@aprilkolwey4779 Thanks for confirming, that's awesome! Really quite handy in a way you could look inside at least, I was considering it for a long time (since I have 4 after all), but I couldn't bring myself to do that to a perfect drive. Appreciate the knowledge surrounding it! Absolutely bizarre find, but that's pretty cool! I'll have to play around with that too at some point, the novelty of a 3.5" drive spinning up via USB is so odd... Certainly another interesting element to these fairly strange units! Thanks for the interesting facts, as usual!
@@aprilkolwey4779 The spindle only spins at 3600rpm which require less power... These things can actually handle the Fujitsu MEA3320BT better than some 7200rpm 2.5 inch drives
