Testing 13 ancient hard drives (Part 1/2) 

You just brought back some great memories.. so funny how different hard drives are, sound, weight, ect.. ect. I remember putting a few in the freezer when they died and it would give me one chance to recover data, not sure why that worked but it actually did .

Ah, Quantum. My very first hard drive was a Quantum Maverick. 503 MB. Even after I eventually upgraded and got bigger hard drives, I would power it up at least once a year for old times sake. I considered it my "lucky hard drive." When it finally stopped working after 15 years, it felt like the end of an era.

Did not appreciate the problems the jumpers caused until now. Going to have to revisit some drives I thought dead.

I collect old computers and among other things I have the problem of leaking ball bearings. Oil is leaking and runs all over the electronics. These are mostly RLL and MFM disks from about 1985. Of course the caps in many cases are a problem too.

I still have my first hard drive, an IDE Maxtor 4GB. The sound it makes is something you can't forget. Nice video as always!

Enjoyed the sights and sounds of Part 1, can't wait for Part 2!

Ahhh that brings back memories! I remember when I went to my first 1.2 GB Western Digital and my old 486 SX-25 BIOS didn't recognize it. Of course the drive came with a floppy to install a LBA boot manager that hacked into the BIOS so allow older computers to see the drive!

Great to see such an amazing collection of old hard drives. I remember putting these, especially the quantums and seagates, in pc's. That reminded me of the way to check the size of quantum drive's. You can read the size on the sticker on the IDE interface. The first one you show it says 85AT, whichs means 85MB ATA drive. Thank you for another great video!

Absolutely lovely sounds! Thanks for sharing those audio bits for us to appreciate.

Older IDE drives are quite resilient. I had a Maxtor one that didn't spin up, so I removed the cover and GENTLY rotated the platters while moving the head assembly over to the parked position. I thought since the heads got stuck that this would be the end of that drive (especially since I opened it up). I was very surprised to hear the driver spin up, seek, and get recognized. One SPINRITE scan later and I got away with only a few KB in bad sectors. Just make sure that no dust and debris gets into them while you have the cover off and blow them out with compressed air when you put it back on. Great collection there. It's very cool to see so many of them work!

This is truly nostalgic. Thanks gor the video.

Very nice and nostalgic video. Brings back not only memories, but also teaches me something i never tried before with any old hard drives that I now wish I would have, being tried the different jumper settings for formatting with either DOS or Windows OS. Despite everything else I had to ever know about from my learnings since I was a teenager about this stuff, I never thought before to try doing that. Really cool stuff.

From what I recall old 3.5" harddrives can break if you run them upside down. Allowed orientation was often stated in the datasheets back then.

That Conner CFS420A !!!! It was the drive in the first PC my family had in 1995 , although ours was 420mb in a DX 2/66. I'll never forget the sound - thank you

I recently picked up a Quantum fireball from an online auction site. It`s a drive I always wanted back in the 90s but could never afford. Nice content.

I love this kind of videos. I look forward for the next!

love those great sounds

Ty for this video! It shall come in handy once I get stuck back into my own pile of old hard drives.

For Quantum drives. The size is written on the sticker on the interface connector. 85AT for 85MB IDE. And S for SCSI. I revive a lot of small (

Quantum drives were a bit quirky by listing all the sizes the particular model line came in on the top label (in this case at 1:44 it lists 42MB, 85MB, 127MB and 170MB for this ProDrive ELS), but the actual size out of all those options is on a sticker on the IDE port plastic (visible at 6:22 where it says "85AT"). This was pretty much universal right up to the end with the Maxtor labelled Quantum Fireballs (I refer to those as Quaxtors) in the ~40GB era

I haven't seen MFM drives in a LONG time, I almost thought you had one, but you can tell the massive size difference. I have one that still spins up and holds a kickass, 32mb and is almost the size of a cement block. :)

At one time Conner owned 54 percent of Olivetti's disk drive business. On the label on top of many Conner drives the first (and largest) line is the drive serial number, the second line is the drive model number, and the forth line down is the date of manufacture.

Interesting and fun video. Hard drive testing is fun, you never know what you're going to get

i love these old harddrives :D

Sound is amazing.

Have been waiting for this video, finally its here!

Cool video dude!

i remember the sounds of these drives, so much nostalgia

9:16 - I thought this description was pretty clear: ‘HSP, when jumpered, connects the -HOST SLV/ACT signal on the interface to ground for those systems that require the slave drive to provide -SLAVE PRESENT signal from the slave drive to a two-drive system.’ So apparently, sometimes the slave needs to provide an active signal. It depends therefore if there is anything listening for that signal. HSP would then be set on the slave, DSP on the master in a two-drive setup.

I've tested/checked over 100 vintage HDDs from the early 90s, and have had many surprises, so please believe me when I say: In order to check old HDDs like these i HIGHLY recommend a newer system ( I use a sk775 mobo) where you can install both WinXP and Win7; and use "HDD Sentinel" to run the long "destructive" Write/Read test (i forget how exactly it's called)... BEFORE partitioning the HDD. It will expose problem areas on the HDD that will turn into bad sectors after a little bit of use. Also it will show you the speed of each sector, so you will know how "tired" are all of the sectors of the HDD. Also, surprisingly, some of these old HDDs have S.M.A.R.T (albeit, a very basic one), which you could also check with HDD Sentinel or preferably HDD Tune Pro, coz it's more intuitive there. You can also check much easier if the HDD is in DMA (and which type), or in PIO (and which type), and do a speedtest with HDD Tune Pro. Win7 and WinXP have a different way of creating partitions. 7 makes the partitions aligned; XP does not... and i think it also does other stuff different. Nevertheless, i've had random HDDs that only played nice with XP. These are my go-to utilities for properly testing and benchmarking HDDs. And believe me when i say that even the windows' scandisk (with bad sectors detection & repair - enabled) is not enough to expose flaws that will come out in these old drives once you actually start using them, and make your life hell. The surface HAS TO BE "stress" tested.

sure nice to hear those old sounds again, still recall the sound of a 10MB brick the size off 2 5,25 slots spinning up, just awesome :D

Nice video. I actually have a Conner CP30104H. I got it used sometime around 1996/1997. I used it in conjunction with a Quantum Trailblazer 850A (which came with the computer I used at the time). The oldest hard drive I have in my possession is a Seagate ST412 that came out of an IBM PC that someone had put on the street as garbage.

I love the sound , can't wait for the other videos 👍🏻👍🏻

great channel . looking forward for the next video.

IDE HDDs are still in use in Santiago de los Caballeros! Last year I installed two Seagate 40GB IDE HDDs to a Pentium 4 HT of my brother-in-law. I installed Peppermint 10 on btrfs using both HDDs in Raid-0. It was a decently usable PC, handling all modern web-sites with Firefox. It booted in ~50 seconds. I still use weekly a Compaq Evo Tower wit Win 98SE stickers. It has a Pentium 4 HT out of a 2003 HP D530 SFF (1C2T; 3.0GHz; 4 x 512MB DDR; 400MHz). It has 4 HDDs 1.21TB (3.5" IDE (250+320GB) and 2.5" SATA-1 (2x320GB)). The IDE HDDs are a Maxtor STM3250820A and a Western Digital WD3200JB. Since June 2019 I use it as backup server once per week running FreeBSD 13.0 on OpenZFS 2.0. Note that OpenZFS is lz4 compressed, so effectively it stores more than 2TB. I used it a few times to restore folders or files.

DS usually means "drive single" meaning it's the only hard drive on the IDE channel.. this was common where you had an ide cable that had only one drive connection.

The noisiest I have is the Quantum Bigfoot TX and some other 10K SCSI hard drives. Gonna reassemble the old Pentium 4 with SCSI drives this weekend. However, due to the noise, will house it somewhere like a cabinet with proper ventilation.

Its amazing that the total hard disk size for all the hard drives shown in the video can fit in a single thumb drive.

Oh great, please more of this! Furthermore, as I’m moving to CF2IDE. Lot of HDD were dying, unfortunately.

Hearing those hard drives spin up and then park the reading head, when shutting down, is my kind of ASMR

I'm surprised there are no WD drives in that collection - they used to be *the* drives to have back in the day, as far as I remember. My very first HDD was a WDAC2120 (125 MByte), installed in a 386 in the early 90s that my parents got for me from a local computer guy. One of the first things I did was taking it apart and putting it back together, which it survived - unlike my later experiments with the 110/220V switch on the PSU 😉

It's nice to see these old, old, old hard drives still functioning! A testament to the quality of engineering that went into their design. I don't think they were intended to keep going after 30+ years, but the extremely high quality parts used in those old drives just keep on going long after the intended function lifespan has elapsed! I have a 20MB Seagate 5.25" Full-Height MFM drive & controller combo that is still going. Noisy & slow, but it's still going and the bushings on the frame have held up through the years. The tantalum capacitor on the 12V rail (on the 20MB Connor) could be the only failure on the drive since tantalum capacitors pretty much ALWAYS fail short circuit, and they are prone to failure simply due to age. So that drive may be recoverable just by doing some R&R on the tantalum caps. (In case you are not aware, the tantalum capacitors, if replaced, really should be replaced with matched tantalum capacitors since they respond differently from other capacitor types to changing current loads and are normally used to provide a cleaner input voltage.)

The sounds of old hard drives. Classic!

I bought my first hard drive before I even got my first Mac. A 210MB 210S ProDrive used for $500 if I remember, in 1992 or so. It still spins up to this day and I can mount it on my machine with a USB-to-SCSI adapter cable. It's a monster.

I remember those old maxtor disk got very hot almost so it burned my fingers om it :) Love the rattling sound of old harddrives :D

I've wasted so much money buying m.2 NVMe drives. Those old spinner drives had class and style.

I laughed at the Dutch part. Brings back so many memories, when I had a 20MB harddisk in my 8088 clone machine.

Yep, looks like the same collection of drives I have in a similar box in the attic. I can not only recognise the models, but also what machine they came most likely out of!

Might I suggest DS is "drive select", in which the drive is commanding "master" status. If my theory is correct, this would be in contrast to CS ("cable select") which I believe left the choice to the BIOS/motherboard. It's been a long time, but that is my educated guess.

I just saw your post on Reddit like right before I opened RU-vid lol 😂

Nice! I wish all drives had pins to attach an activity LED. I love blinking lights! haha.

I went through a bunch of Conner SCSI drives on my early Amigas. In fact, I'm looking forward to seeing part 2 of this video, to see what happens with that Quantum SCSI drive. I went through a ton of those, too. It would be interesting if it has AmigaOS on it. Would be a shame to wipe it before finding out.

2:05 - the size of the drive is on the white barcode label near the IDE connector. It'll say something like 85AT or 1280A. You can format with the /u, you won't get any messages about it being out of memory. Basically it won't try to backup the files (/u is unconditional)

It is amazing to think that today, if all of those hard drives were completely full and intact enough to be able to harvest the data on them, a single-layer single-sided DVD or cheap 4 GB promotional thumb drive from a job fair would have room to spare for backup of those drives, and some of them are small enough that, with the exception of the 1.3 GB drive, you could back up their content combined onto a CD.

I did some testing like this on my channel. MFM drives on my 286, stepper IDE and a bit newer on a 386, and a few LBA drives on a 486 with newer bios support.

I’ve got a conner cfs-420A. It’s works as well since 1994 when it was plugged in my 486 dx2/66.

I remember back when I worked in it that we used the screw driver tick a lot of times.

Playing with old hard drives never gets.. old. :) Love the sounds as much as you do! DS is short for either Drive Select (likely a modern bastardization) or, wait for it: Default Setting. The latter I believe is the original definition, and was used by at least Quantum way back in the day. Check their spec papers and you'll find it there. Hard drives always came pre-configured as a master drive from the factory, hence that's the default setting. Makes sense. :)

If you use an 80 conductor cable, you can almost always use CS. For 40 conductor cables, they had to be wired specifically for cable select, and most weren't - probably a cost reduction or something like that. But then, some of the older drives don't like the extra resistance of the thinner wires in 80 conductor cables.

I was shocked to see Dutch on the screen. I would have never guessed listening to you.

I have a 152mb NEC hard drive that came out of a PC-9821 Cs2 and what I think is cool about it is that instead of using jumpers it actually uses dip switches. I think that's a much better idea.

The oldest working HDD I still have right now is a Quantum Fireball EX3.2A from around 1999, now used as a small backup storage via IDE/SATA to USB converter. Anything older than that, I don't have them anymore. And I don't think I've ever seen SCSI drives directly.

I had an old CORE INTERNATIONAL 160 MB ESDI drive. The spin up sounded like a small JET ENGINE starting up. Who remembers DRIVE OVERLAYS for the 1st gen gigabyte drives.

Awesome! Be careful with the Quantum drives though. They have a rubber bump stop and over time when it degrades, the rubber can melt and gum up the drive or the heads will slam up against it thus making the CLUNK noise. All Quantum drives will die at some point

I enjoyed the nostalgia of this video. If I can access older drives and find something of interest, I will image the drive. Then I write zeros, or low level format them then see if I can install at least DOS or Linux on them.

From my point of view, 120 megabytes was the size where IDE came into its own. This size in particular was extremely common, the drives were affordable in the US, and motherboard support was common, even on the low end. Every other technology was on its way out at this point, except SCSI which was relegated to Macs and servers, and then just servers. IBM was the only straggler with ESDI, but they eventually saw the light.

CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune are also very handy tools to test and check HDD's on a modern system ! As long as they are AT drives, they can't do much with XT drives.

Old hard drives, always a good sight :-D

I still remember buying my first 1 gigabyte hard drive back in the day! It was a 5.25" drive and I thought I'd never be able to use 1 gigabyte of storage space! 😂

You could try different power jack or power supply with those start-stop drives. I used to have the problem with an antique Conner drive. It did not like 650W power supply on my modern desktop PC, but started okay in his old PC or if powered from a separate external power supply.

I wonder if mine still works, many years ago I had an old rig that my dad used. All my data was transferred to my new laptop, but it’s a hefty old beast of a hard drive.

Back in the days of this vintage tec, "Quantum"-HD`s were great ! "Conner".... on the other hand.... i`ve never sold this kind of crap ! Good video !

01:52 - Quantum drives always have their capacity first on the paper label on the connector, look at 02:11, it says "85AT".

A friend of mine gets a kick out of repairing basket case drives. Even by opening them and cleaning the rubber goo out and replacing the bumpers and all that. If you feel like donating bad drives to him, I could get you two in touch.

I have a 486 DX2 66 with a Seagate St-4096 75 MB MFM hard drive in it. It has a little over 100 KB of bad sectors on it, but it works.

I have the exact same issue with a quantum trailblazer 850mb I have. Detected, DOS installed, but won't boot. Will look at this jumper when I get a chance

I have an old Conner peripherals CP-3044 hard drive that came out from an old 386 laptop. when I first powered it up (after it was last used on the laptop) it spinned to life then clicked two times and it turned off… Then I opened up the drive and actually after opening the drive up it spinned to life it completed the seektest and it was fine (I was able to install DOS and windows 3.0 ) but after some use it had major reading and writing issues. Also this was my fist hard drive that didn’t had a stepper motor

I like sound of working old hard disc drive

My first time seeing a working Conner drive.

My oldest drive currently is a 8GB WD from the original Xbox. A video of Win98 in 386 sounds interesting!

DS stands for Drive Select.

DS stands for Drive Select... whether it's Master or Slave (first or second position on the IDE cable)... CS is Cable Select. it's been quite a few years since i had to deal with this and.... oh my god the nightmares of dealing with this in MS-DOS and Win3.1 and Win95 are coming back to me now... :P

I once came upon a IDE drive that didn't want to spin up if it wasn't grounded properly. I had to place it on the case or inside the drive cage, otherwise it just refused to run. Can't remember the brand, though. Also, I encountered some very old disks that didn't like 80 pin cables on more modern UDMA controllers and only worked with old style 40 pin cables and a corresponding PIO mode controller. And: Sometimes a disk reports wrong or different CHS settings to what was used to format them in old PC that had no way to enter these values manualy into the BIOS. Some very old disks don't support auto detection at all, which can be problematic if you try to read them with a modern USB adapter.

My first HD drive in my first PC (a 386SX25 with 2MB of RAM) was a Seagate ST351A/X that went dead just after the warranty period😮

A 386SX with 16 MB RAM ? That's a lot and should be top of the line at that era. My AMD 486DX4-100Mhz only came with 4MB RAM and a 420MB Conner harddrive which still lives today.

It could be interestin if you try GRC spinrite tool on some of that problem or bad block drives ?

I still have a Seagate ST3250A in working condition. It came from my high school.

I also have in my oldest laptop which is a Toshiba Satellite 330cds from 1998 with its original 4 gb hard drive and I recently ran scandisk in DOS and it still shows no bad sectors. Isn't bad for a hard drive thats almost 24 years old. It runs Windows 98 second edition.

To me an 'ancient hard drive' needs to be a MFM, RLL or ESDI drive. I used to like those old Connors... they held up to a lot of abuse. Honestly, a lot of these old drives were amazingly reliable in their day and rarely did you lose a whole drive without warning like in 'somewhat modern' times (after 1999). Can't tell you how many times I would have to wait for hours low levelling a troublesome drive late at night and then they would work better than new.

that bracket that was on that quantum is the exact same bracket as was on my quantum in an ast bravo lc4/33 i had.. could be from a simmilar computer :)

2:03 - that's because you can calculate it from the cylinders heads and sectors - the effective size depends on what mode you planned to use it in along with the file system used. These days there's only a couple of really common formats used, and manufactures make a blanket assumption. I recall way back in the late 90's having to set drives to a particular mode because the bios wouldn't recognize more than a specific number of sectors and/or heads.

I have an Hitachi 30mb RLL Drive that still works. I had a pair but one had failed in storage for some reason.

You should have made the video longer and test them all. Eventhough still a nice video. Makes me wanna try my old 128mb hdd again.

Mineral oil or axel grease mixed with alcohol. Most likely the bearings are dry and consuming way too much current, hence the overload relay is shutting down the 21mb Conner drive.

I once was able to get a drive spinning by tapping with a screwdriver the back of the platter bearing. It worked ok for two or three years after that.

this reminds me of having to use the sysgen command in my cp/m machine on a brand new blank disk, that first connor sounds more like a geiger counter

Funny to see some very old Dutch language installations on these hard drives

Got an ol' Conner drive like those a 600MB one in my 486 IPC, that's a real shame some of the conner drives you got died given how nice they sound IMO, and seem rather reliable otherwise from the little experience I got with them.

Not Bad result ! Oliveti supposed drives errors, rest one clearly old and two 80th connors working fine. Would love have that win 3.1 drive out of nostalgia feelings, but you need the right machine to do so !

I had a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive. I loved her! Not because of the memory size, speed or processing, no, because of the sound! Not decoupled, metal on metal. SOOOOO LOUD 😂 I have to admit it may have had a bit of damage, hence the volume, but hey, who can say their hard drive sounds like an MG??😂 *BRRRRRRTT* Read... *BRRT* *BRRT* *BRRT* Load... *BRRRRRRRT* *BRRRRRRTTT* *BRRT* *BRRT* Execute *lightvibration* 😂 I kinda miss her now that I think about it...😂