Utterly insane that we expected these to last billions of cycles of the heads being moved back and forth between extremes at 100Hz. Madness, I tell you.
String drive? This, like most motor-actuated hard disks, uses a steel rotary band actuator. It's made of a flat strip of steel cut into two halves which wraps around the capstan on the stepper's output shaft.
The steel rotary band is the standard method of actuation for almost all motor-driven hard disk drives. Very few use gears because they introduce slack into the mechanism and force the motor to turn faster, shortening the useful life of the drive.
@@matthewsvideos8235 None of this is true. Almost all motor actuated IDE drives can be low level formatted, and Seagate even had a tool specifically for formatting these drives, called SGTFMT. Even if that were true, almost all SCSI drives support the LLF command and all ESDI drives require it just as ST-506 and ST-412 interface drives do.
@@TheDiskMaster Generally I do not do a low level format on IDE drives with my 386. I only do it on the worst of the drives as an absolute last resort if the drive is going to end up in the dead bin. Some have been successful. I have a few to try it on, but don't think they will work again.
Good ol ST-157A, they're picky about IDE controllers. Only drive to ever electrocute me personally. The ST-125 is easily one of the best 20MB ST-412 interface drives out there, simply due to it's robustness and auto parking.
In theory, it will work with any machine that still includes an IDE controller. The ST-157A is well known for not being very compatible between IDE controllers, but otherwise it should not be difficult at all to make working of drive.
