Soo, here’s a new lot of untested drives for my collection, and this time, it’s a very interesting one.
This lot was expensive, 167€ after shipping and fees, but it also is the most interesting lot I ever bought, with 11 drives all from the late 80s or very early 90s. Some of the drives in this lot are either usually impossible to find for sale, or are at insane prices on sites like eBay. Here, they are at just slightly over 15€ each…
Here’s a list of the drives in the lot:
MiniScribe 8425SA
2x Quantum Q250
2x Quantum Prodrive 40S
2x Rodime RO652
Rodime RO3058T
Rodime RO3085T
Rodime RO5125S
Seagate ST-125N
They are untested though, and might all be dead for all I know… Let’s find out!
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I recommend watching the video before reading further, spoilers below.
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Well it really seemed like it was going horribly wrong at first, but in the end it actually was a really decent lot that was worth the money. Sure, it would have been great if the two 3.5 voice coil Rodime worked, especially as it seems like the damage might have been caused by humidity/moisture but overall it went quite well.
But obviously, there’s something that didn’t go well, the Rodime RO652 that I seemingly killed.
When I set the drive up with an OS etc I had to do it 3 times because the partition would get corrupted for some reason. And when I wanted to record the OS booting on it, I got sector not found errors, and errors because things in config.sys couldn’t load, so the partition was once again corrupted. Armed with the knowledge that I had fixed the broken band one, I unscrewed the stepper motor and moved it slightly, my goal was to then do a SCSI format (which is pretty much a low level format for SCSI drives) and hopefully have it be more reliable, but instead it just gave me a medium error. After messing with the stepper again, it let me do one SCSI format attempt but I got the medium error afterwards. After that I messed with it for hours but couldn’t make it work again. I ended up removing the top platter to take a look, and it looks like there’s damage near the outer edge, right where the drive goes when it starts up, so maybe it would’ve failed anyways, I’m really not sure.
At least the broken band one works for now. It’ll be interesting to see how long it lasts before the super glue breaks off (or the piece of ribbon snaps I guess, but the superglue breaking seems more likely). I think I’ll regularly start it up to see if it still works or not, I’m really curious to know how long it can last, as I always thought super glue didn’t even work in the past. With the other one being dead, I really hope it’ll last, as it’s not like I can easily got another one of these.
18 июл 2024
