Test and try: Does this 40 year old Tandon TM-252 drive still work?
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- Опубликовано: 2 апр 2024
- It's time to see if an old 40 year old hard drive still works. This one sports corrosion on the outside case and and an unknown 8-bit ISA controller. Let's see if this old beat still spins and if it actuall yworks!
Tandon TM-252, 10mb ST-506/MFM hard drive
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Tandon was bought by Western Digital.
Before, WD only made controllers. They had the idea to integrate the controller on the drive electronics and connect the drives directly to the PC's bus via a 40-pin cable. They couldn't find a drive manufacturer to cooperate with them, so they simply bought Tandon for their drive manufacturing plant. All of WD's early IDE drives were 3.5" Tandon (TM262/362 or TM282/382) drives with a new PCB.
So technically Tandon still exists, it's just named WD now :)
That's awesome info, thank you!
Super cool story! Way more detail than Wikipedia provided. :) They basically took that $80M from WDC and tried to turn themselves into a full on PC manufacturer, but it did not work out and they folded within 2 years.
Tandon was a big manufacturer of floppy drives. Later, they created a PC compatible computer with removable HD platters that shared a dock with all the PCB components.
"They had the idea to integrate the controller on the drive electronics and connect the drives directly to the PC's bus via a 40-pin cable." And thus IDE was born. First versions of IDE were literally nothing more than some bus transceivers that pass through the ISA bus signals onto the IDE cable when certain I/O port addresses were used. The ATA command set to make it work like a hard drive was defined by Western Digital, but there was no real physical limitation for it t support other devices. The IDE controllers were just buffering data and exposing an interface.
Super interesting!! Thanks for sharing this!
Tandon drives all sounded like that. That's NORMAL for them!! I remember those things from WAY back in my CompUSA days. They all sounded like they were hand-cranking a flywheel to start a WWII Tiger tank. Ah, memories!
Pretty much all 5 1/4" hard drives were massively noisy even when they were relatively new (very loosely speaking, these puppies were around ten years old when I first got my hands onto them). I was always fascinated by the slow spin-up, especially of full-height drives. I only ever encountered one HDD with a stepper motor, a 10 MB NEC from a broken Bull Micral XT. It was even more fascinating than this one because the stepper drove the heads using an exposed pinion gear.
Let's face it, 3.5" drives were noisy too, well into the double-digit GB era, only then they got remarkably more quiet. Quantum drives were the absolute worst, they poduced a painful high-pitched whine even brand new. The last of the noisy ones I had was a 10 GB I think. 2.5" drives were much quieter from the start.
@@Ragnar8504 The first drives with a fluid dynamic bearing were from (I think) Fujitsu around 2001. I know this because I frequently ordered fujitsu drives as replacement parts in a repair contract and then one day the FDB version was delivered. Shortly after all other manufacturers also started using FDBs in their drives. Since then they've been silent throughout their lives. FDBs also enabled high speed drives in the 10-15 krpm regime.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Cool, didn't know that!
Agreed. When I heard that, I thought, oh, yeah, that is going to work, sounds normal to me.
SuperStor was drive compression software, a competitor to Stacker and Microsoft's DoubleSpace/DriveSpace. It was included in DR-DOS 6.0 and IBM PC DOS 6.3.
Adrian - the low performance with the 8-bit controller was in part due to the fact that you did not have the card's BIOS address shadowed in the PC's BIOS. When you use an ISA controller for your HDD with an EPROM, not enabling that will cause that.
Yeah. It's equivalent to a GPU running slow because the Resizable BAR feature was turned off.
Mark/Release was created to dynamically add/remove drivers and TSRs. First you do a MARK, then load driver1, then MARK, then driver2,etc. RELEASE unloads the last loaded driver/TSR up to the latest MARK, following reverse order.
WOW! 40 odd years later and the dang thing is not only still working but working perfectly!
In the words of my favorite wascally wabbit, "What an anti-kyu-ey!" Over forty years old and not a single defect on any sector. That's freakin' amazing, man.
That era of hard drive protocols was really interesting. ST-506 was intended for floppy and hard drives to exist on the same cable, some computers did use that method of attaching drives (I believe the PDP-11 did). The drive itself is dumb, and the control signals are the same as the floppy drive (the data lines are re-purposed for status).
CDC used a very similar signaling method for their "Finch" hard disks and floppy disks, Usagi Electric has some really interesting videos on them. I compared the signals and there are a few pins swapped around but otherwise they are identical, so it's possible that they are either copied from each other or even more or less compatible on an electrical level.
I'd hazard a guess that they're both mostly-copied from some manufacturer's app notes.
Wanna talk loud? The stepperband motor on my Amiga 500's 20mb HDD (non-standard, was kept in it's own box separate from the controller that plugged in on the side) was SO loud you could hear the heads accessing 2 rooms away! It was absolutely insanely loud. The whole thing sounded like a vaccuum cleaner motor going with a typewriter chittering overtop.
i had an ESDI drive in a 286 that would shake my 50 gallon fish tank from 20 feet away...
Steve Gibson, the brain behind "Spinrite" has an interesting podcast called "Security Now". I think it's one of the oldest podcasts around, nearly 20 years with information about digital security.
Good lord, an MFM drive! I love the sound of those, I used to sleep right next to my old XT machine beginning of the 90's and found the sound very soothing. Low-level formatting took the whole night in those days. Good memories. Wish I still had one.
Just did a low level on 10TB = 14+ hours
@@player_unknown963 I am so jealous of you :-)
I remember the creaking and groaning of the stepper in my ST-225 drive (20MB) back in 1990. With everything you did, the harddisk would react as there was hardly any cache available for disk operations.
oh those times. trying every interleave value until you got the highest throughput - 125kBytes/sec :P
"Mark" and "release" are programs to manage TSRs, mostly to unload TSR
Hey Adrian, I hope you copied over the UTIL folder to your XTIDE before wiping the drive. Some of those programs are really interesting. Haven't heard of them before.
Adrian, I just bought a learn to solder kit and a bunch of little test projects off Amazon. Im in my 40s, but you can never be too old to learn a new skill right? Im starting from the ground up, basically directly due to your YT channel. I got tired of just watching, I want to learn how to do this too. At least a tiny bit. :D
Nice to hear !
Flux, flux is magic ;)
@@charlesdorval394I thought itd be wise to get some extra stuff like wick, but the first thing I thought of immediately was "buy flux". That is 100% from this channel.
I’m going to learn soldering myself also inspired by Adrian and I’m 39 lol
I learned in my mid 30s because of YT channels like Adrian's. I first got one of those awful cheap solder irons that wasn't temperature controlled and thought soldering was really hard. Then I got the Pinecil based on Adrian's recommendation and learned I'm actually not terrible at soldering after all!
Please learn to use the right test equipment to check your workpiece for any stored voltages before firing up the soldering iron, especially if that workpiece is an old CRT monitor or power supply unit with big caps. (The kits you bought probably won't have any of those, but I'd hate for you to get a big zap.) Wear your safety glasses, and use adequate ventilation to keep from inhaling lead-bearing fumes. (Yeah, I'm old school...)
That spin up sound and sound of the drive is almost ASMR-like….love the sound of spinning drives, floppy drives etc
Unlike Adrian I do actually enjoy the sound of 40 year old spinning rust!
I love those old drives!
A vintage computer isn't the same without that power on drive spin up & initialization, and the glorious seek sound while accessing data.
I don't want CF cards in any of my old computers. The true experience is missing. I especially like the 5.25 drive bay covers with the activity LED. 😊
Agreed, but… Adrian, PLEASE lubricate that bearing! You have sliding rollers! RUclips audio compression does not filter that out, and AS MUCH AS I PRAYED FOR BAD EARS my 50 year old eardrums still cringe at that high whine!
HDD's, dot matrix printers, modems. I for sure have a fond memory of those sounds. Oh and the booiinng...click! when hitting the degauss button on the CRT :D
Yeah that spin up sound was fantastic.
The drive seeking sound that was used in every movie scene with a computer in it for 30 years at least.
One important thing about stepper motor HDD's, is that the physical orientation can effect the drives operation. Flipping the drive on it's side may require a new low level format, as the heads end up in different spots due to gravity effecting the heads. This used to be a real problem back in the day, as users would flip the computer on it's side, and the hard drive would stop working. Come in, do a low level, partition, and DOS format all would be good.
Minus their data (high probability)
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Always minus the data. Low level format tends to do that! ^-^
But people back in the day did stupid shit, just like today. Had one customer in the late 80's, HDD would be intermittent with the monitor on top of the case. (The weight of the monitor was causing the case to warp, thus pressing on the HDD). Told them to just not do that, and it'd be fine. Nope, $500 later, all fixed. Stupid.
You should see if the original 8 bit controller has a built in low level formatting routine with G=C800:5 from DEBUG
The missing data happens because the magnetic domains move. For example if your have two north poles next to reach other they spread apart while a north and south next to each other will start to drift together. Even if the domains are still strong they're now out of alignment with the heads. If they aren't too far out of alignment doing a read and write (move files) to everything puts the data back right under the heads. SpinRite does this (plus other stuff). Doing multiple reads can sometimes get a good read and allow the software (with CRC checks) re-write the data again. Newer drives do a compensated write where they put the like poles closer together and the unlike poles farther apart. This also has to be compensated not only for bits in series but to the bits in nearby tracks.
It still amazes me how many discrete utilities had to be installed on early PCs just to keep the darn things running. We take for granted everything built in to modern operating systems and the massively improved hardware that "just works."
Back in "the day" they did just work. You only had to know dos commands to run your productivity app.
You didn't have to worry about low level formatting a drive, or interleave settings, etc... unless you built the computer or were fixing it.
Only when things get old do these issues seem more crazy. As modern hardware ages it won't just work in the future.
In the days of 486s to the Pentuims you needed a few CDs just for the motherboards and its peripherals.
Which is just as tedious but one tends to ignore it due to the "splashy" installer CDs used during setup.
@@volvo09 Ah, your rose colored glasses are strongly tinted, my friend. Things did work fine once set up, but I for one do not miss the days of yore before PnP and SSD that do not need defragmenting. There was considerably more overhead when maintaining computers because it all needed to be done manually. Yes, I cut my teeth on computers that way and learned much, but now I am much too comfortable with the technology of today to return to the old ways except purely for nostalgia.
@@artofnoise5013 oh things are absolutely better today. It's great to not have to change jumpers when installing a new card, install drivers in dos, add network protocols, etc...
I get what you were saying now, I responded to you from an "end user sitting at a computer" perspective.
I totally prefer today's "plug and play" computer experience, never would have thought anyone non technical could reinstall an OS and have drivers automatically install as long as you have an internet connection.
My old computers are only a fun toy to revisit and play with, I don't really want those days back!
@@volvo09 Yes, from an end user perspective things were probably simpler as there was internet connection, no updates, and nothing that changed. As long as no one breathed on the machine everything was fine!
The clamps holding the lid on instead of screws assists reducing case stress as the hard disk heats up while powered on. Several stepper motor based hard disks from this era had thermal issues. Seagate's ST-225 is probably the most remembered example, but for the '225 it was the PCB underneath causing it. Loosen the screws a bit, re-LLF and problem solved from then on.
beside a bunch of antique drives, I still have my very first hard disk, an ST-225, in a box. No idea if it still works, I lost the MFM controller for it. tested them for spin-up about 10 years ago and it sounded as if it still initialized.
I didn't realise the ST-225 was still a stepper motor drive! It looks completely sealed from the outside, unless I'm remembering the wrong drive, so I always assumed it was a voice coil drive.
@@Ragnar8504 You can see the stepper axle through a hole in the backplane PCB of the drive, and I've had to use that hole once to get the stepper unstuck after having been in a box for donkeys years.
Still working after all this time, salute to this spinning warrior.
Really?! I JUST started working on refurbishing my Tandy 1000 HD and it came with this exact drive. And it works beautifully! I haven't watched this yet, but hopefully yours works too!
SpinRite 2, probably the last version (or maybe second last) that wasn't more snake oil that useful. 🤣
I love videos about these old drives.
Likely the cost difference comes from the AT having a controller built in, while the Compaq/XT version includes a controller as well as the drive. This is amazing to find one of these drives in such perfect shape. Seems like it should go into a period-correct XT. I started my IT programming career doing BASIC and PASCAL on a 10Mb XT in 1984!
The sound the drive made on first power up, your neighbours must have thought a tornado siren was going off, that was quite the noise!!! :P
Fun video Adrian. When larger capacity MFM hard drives started coming on the market in the late 80's, they wouldn't work in our Compaq 286 machines and we had to purchase the WD WAH model MFM controllers before we could upgrade.
17:24 - that sounds like my childhood ;)
Hope you save those DOS utilities to archive or similar.
I had a Type 1 in a 286 (came out of a DEC rainbow) - it was twice as high as that drive. No bad sectors ;) - That drive was from 1981, I can imagine it was a $2,000 drive at the time ;)
In a way the stepper motor driver are better than later voice coil hard drives. Modern hard drives have a servo track that lets the drive know where the tracks are, however if the magnetic patterns become degraded then the drive will be unable to locate the tracks - so game over, it's junk. These servo tracks are written in the factory using a special jig, the controller that comes with the drive cannot do that.
These old stepper motor drives don't have a servo track, and you can totally re-write everything.
With the stepper, each step takes you to the next track, with a voice coil there are no hard steps, it just moves the heads until it finds the next servo track, so if that is lost then the servo will just hunt about a bit, find nothing, then just error out, no options, it's a goner.
A voice coil actuator cannot move the heads a fixed amount, so it's impossible for it to be used to lay out a new servo track.
Pity you didn't keep the old HDD contents.
Isn't that what self servo writing does?
I had an older drive similar to this one. It worked until the "rubber" seal had turned to liquid. The drive failed and was scrap. Cool viddy!
I remember being a very young person (10 12) late 80s early 90s, these were the old drives back then coming out of old 286 machines and business XTs with controllers in them like that one.. yeah wow.. the time it took to low level format one of those drives and then it's a 15mb or 20mb drive.. yikes. But.. they worked really well, and it was tough to kill an old RLL or MFM drive, you really had to beat on it to kill them. A good low level and they were fresh as new. Thanks for this trip down memory lane Adrian!!
Quick tip in regard to a comment you made while talking about the impact driver. Drilling a pilot hole before screwing into wood may still be a good idea depending on the situation. It’s as much if not more so about preventing splitting as it is about getting the screw in.
Wow this really takes me back. When you were sure this wasn't a 10Mb drive I knew it was, because I installed them on machines in the mid 80s at Ohio State. I used debug to do the low level format though. I can't remember the 10Mb command, but I did several hundred Segate 20Mb and I think it was debug: g=c800:5. Later stuff was easier. The first hard drive I ever saw was a full height 10Mb. I also had forgotten about Spinrite. Thanks for your content, and for the fond memories.
I got excited when I heard you say you didn't know of a way to check for existing or optimal interleave of a hard drive, and then you mentioned SpinRite so I didn't have to.
List, if it's the same program I'm thinking of, will allow you to view the contents of files. I worked for a company that used that to display text files. It's very useful actually. Later versions have a Hex mode too.
With the early 5150 PC's we would take a 10 MB MFM drive and pair them with an 8 bit RLL controller and be able to reformat to get 15MB out of them. The magnetic media was not supposed to be able handle the increased sectors and there was no guarantee that your data would be safe, but most of the time it worked fine. Computing was fun back in the early 80's.
I never had a Hercules color card (actually called the In Color card) but I remember it to be a competent high res card with 16 colors (out of 64) displayable and required special drivers in the few programs that supported it.
To be honest I miss the older HDDs and the sounds they made. It actually said "hey I'm working." Though in a server room with all the HDDs and fans yeah that gets annoyingly loud.
Back in the late '80s/early '90s, I got hold of an XT clone with the 20MB Tandon drive. It sounded like that then, too. It's surprising how much a heavy steel computer case can attenuate hard drive noise.
I had one of those in the XT i got ahold of in the early 90s. My main machine was a 286 @ 20MHz (Harris was the fab under license, like AMD, several companies made 286s), 4MB onboard RAM, and two SCSI hard drivew, a 40 and an 80 megabyte, and EGA. I was ballin. 🤣
25:58 - very interessting program.
I bought a similar 10mb full height hard drive for work for an original IBM PC in 1981. It came in an external enclosure with a controller card and power supply and a custom cable, as well as special software to get the PC to recognize it . I believe we paid $5000 in 1981 dollars! for it!
Excellent as usual. It brought me back to when we were using sector editors to midify floppies while looking for, and removing protection ( C64 ) Good times, meh.
My first PC class was XT clone, with 10MB MFM HDD branded Cogito Systems, probably one of mentioned ephemeric disk manufacturers. The controller was full-length card, based on the Z80. The drive looked exactly like ST225 and was as noisy as your Tandon. I managed to put Windows 3.1 (albeit in real mode) on it - each and every mouse movement was causing the drive to "tweet" for 10-15 seconds until anything happened ;)
I think you should use the more modest 386 board with all bios format goodies still in it. I would call those 16-bit controllers mainly compatibile (with drives and pc's), and I remember drives needed LL format anyway. Also, put bios ram exclusions where expected - it is better to do it first and turn off later (as I discovered , some things should work without it, but don't!)
Indeed magnetic media can "go bad" through entropy - the ordered domains just naturally decay. HP sold a pocket computer with a pull-card solution for data storage. It was recommended to read the cards occasionally because that would also rewrite the built-in timing tracks and so refresh the storage organization if not the data itself.
The older drives used weaker read and write heads so the strength of the domains was lower to start with. If I remember correctly by the start of the IDE era the on platter domains were over 10 times stronger than the MFM era.
High density requires higher domain strength for some reason. I think it has to do with domain strength falling off over physical area? I think.
I have a bunch of gotek floppy emulators loaded with the flashfloppy firmware. With one of those stubby little flash drives you can have gaggles of floppy images and avoid the issues with random old floppies going bad on you. Also flashfloppy lets you emulate floppy drives for lots of different systems, not just PC>
16-bit MFM disk controller usually does have their BIOS extensions onboard. A controller card takes 2 memory addresses, one is controller i/o, and the second one is BIOS. This particular 16-bit WD MFM controller can coexist with the IDE host adapter when set to SECONDARY, it will however conflict with XTIDE BIOS at memory location C800 (but XTIDE can be switched to another memory location).
The noise MAY be from the grounding strap for the spindle motor (look at the bottom of the drive). These wear a bit and can be a bit noisy. You might want to check it out.
@35:27 you can low level a disk using DOS debug. Quick google says for WD controllers AH takes drive (0 or 1) and AL takes interleave. Then jump to c800:5. You can set AH/AL as AX via "r ax". Then "g=c800:5" for the jump.
The way i used to find the "perfect" interleave setting was just lowlevel format the drive with all the possible factors and write down the time it took to boot DOS after the DOS install. It always ended up being interleave 5.
Not knowing which way the cable was before taken out? Relatable AF.
This drive, with the Compaq tools, reminds me of the Compaq XT-compatible that my supervising professor used for a "time clock" for me and my fellow student workers --- well into the mid 90s.
Pretty sure me and my dad used to use debug g=c800 or something to LLF MFM HDDs. I know it could be done from DOS without and external tools though.
I sometimes miss working with this kind of tech. Yeah, getting into computers, the 486 was out, but I was stuck on that for quite a while from hand-me-down parts. Before I actually went out and bought all new parts, I had a 486 Overdrive, 33 MHz FSB and 100 MHz core, 850 MB HDD, obligatory 1.44 3.5" floppy, 16x cdrom, 16 MB RAM and an SVGA card (don't remember the manufacture). I had that machine up until about 1998 (wow...16 years old... where did the time go?) when I bought parts to build an AMD K6-2 machine with 64 MB RAM.
What you could do is get a microphone that you stick to these hard drives and record a separate soundtrack of the audio nasties as they happen, so you can mix it into the final video, and then we can all enjoy that hard drive start-up sound and other noises that they make.
We bought a little HP microserver last year to run an application at the office, and it came with a pair of branded HDDs that honestly sound like something out of the late 80s. I'm not sure what SQL Server is doing that constantly accesses them, but it sounds like a rock tumbler crunching away all the time.
I once had a RAID array of 8 full height 5 1/4" SCSI HDDs, now that really made a noise especially when seeking.
I can describe that sound, it sounds like that drive has a dry bearing or is dragging a head. But since the drive is working, I'd go with 'dry bearing', especially after backing up to figure out "what the hell is that high pitched sound I haven't heard in 30 years"
Those aluminium rails, you can probably mod them to use them as soft jaws for a vice.
I have an ICT Data Chief for my C128 which has a Tanden clone of the ST-225 but it is a 3.5” half height drive in a 5.25” sled. The stepper motor sounds identical to yours however mine has stiction and I have to manually spin it to get it started. Then it’ll be fine until it powers down and parks.
I believe that the 'fading' of data is called bit rot.
Have you ever seen a Tandon Pac PC? Tandon made a PC with 2 drive bays that took a drive in a cage and plastic enclosure that you could eject swap out. You could boot off of either drive and it came with a utility that remapped the drive letter of the disk you booted from. Also, while running you could eject the non-boot disk and insert another drive.
That thing you talk about the magnetic flux fading, being rejuvenated by low level formating.. That was already a thing back on th days. I kinda remember a software doing that without data loss...
8:25 All SATA drives implement the ATA/ATAPI command set which, put simply, extends ATA with the SCSI command set. USB mass storage devices also use SCSI which is why in Linux for example both usb mass storage devices and SATA drives use the same device file naming convention sdx.
Impact drivers are da bomb. It’ll drive a screw home without stripping it’s driver interface out.
In the case of my old miniscribe drive the low level format was on the controller card. It was accessed through DOS debug and the address on the card.
Forgot about having to park the drive. Holy cow I'm old!
Ha ha, oh yeah, "Landing Zones", I remember those those. Man, it's been years since I've seen those, oh no...
For super reluctant Phillips head screws that slip, and you really need to get the item apart. A good technique to use, is to crazy glue a piece of paper to the stripped screw head, and while it is still wet, put the bit on and holding the bit tightly into the stripped head, wait until the glue dries. then attach the impact driver and the screw will normally come right out. There are some where even that technique won't work and the only answer I have found for that issue, is to drill it out.
Spinrite from Steve Gibson does figure out the optimum interleave. My goto tool to maintain old MFM drives!
Le premier clavier que j' ai touché, c'était d'un ordinateur tandon, avec un moniteur monochrome vert, c'était la belle époque ❤
Re the impact driver, the reason to use a bit holder with some flex is I'm pretty sure just to avoid destroying your bits or fasteners -- I've had e.g. less expensive torx bits shatter in the impact driver. Also bit holders not intended for impact drivers can be torn apart -- had one that had a friction fit shank that just fell apart after some abuse.
Any kind of shock absorber is actually going to reduce the effectiveness of the hammering. The whole point is to take the long slow gentle torque your hand is applying, and focus it into shorter sharper shocks. But there's enough, and there's too much! And having a little flex in the bit holder could be important if it keeps the shock just below the level that destroys your tools :)
No word of a lie .. back in the day there was a far-eastern company called Daei Yeung (Daeyoung?) making hard drives. What an unfortunate name for a product that demands reliability. They really should have consulted a western marketing firm before plying the North American market.
it's a survivor!! Maybe a lubricant on the mechanics to go well .
That warbling noise is normal for that series of drive. Tm252 is 306 cyl, 4 head, 17 spt, write precomp at cyl 128 , park at cyl 305, usually had to use a park utility iirc
I have an Atari Megafile 30 with a Seagate ST-238R MFM drive. Even inside the box is very loud, seems to be louder than that Tandy. Best part about the Seagate? Still 0 (zero) bad sectors!
Adrian is shocked, SHOCKED. Well, not that shocked.
08:27 SATA drives uses two different command sets: ATA and AHCI. ATA is essentially an IDE/CF/original AT hard drive card compatible command set, while AHCI is closer to SCSI command set.
and AHCI is really only for optical drives, maybe certain other removable kinds of storage, because ATA is only for normal hard drives (and SSDs for pre-NVME drives)
@@Nukle0nYou're thinking of ATAPI.
It is the SCSI command set, which is why SATA drives run under the SCSI subsystem in Linux.
@@douro20Oh, yea. Which is also SCSI based.
IDE stands for integrated drive electronics, so IDE drives have a disk controller integrated with the drive itself, and the so-called IDE controller is called the host adapter.
In my experience early model voice coil HDD can fail from the coating on the magnets cracking and then coming loose. It sticks to the main magnet and interferes with the head coil.
Not sure what case those rails fit, but someone custom made them on a mill.
I've done that before, only with a waterjet, needed some rails for an Antec case I got from a friend and it didn't have any rails with it.
Ah, the days of turning on your computer and hearing the sound of an air raid siren. My SSDs really don't cut it in terms of fun noise/sounds. But they're a little faster :)
I believe the purpose of processor chips with EPROM-type windows was to eliminate the external ROM / EPROM on simpler applications or have a permanent 'bootstrap' ROM on board.
Given the small size, it seems a little sad to separate the drive / drive controller. This drive probably came from an original Compaq Portable. It may be good to keep it - just in case you ever need to build a Compaq with original hardware.
Good video.
I can't believe that thing actually booted.
I worked with XTs and ATs, and I really hated the noise even back then. I was looking into solid state way before it went mainstream; embedded sometimes required it so there were options but they were so expensive. It was a glorious day once the SATA SSDs finally became affordable (albeit for tiny capacities).
All that said, Flash memory requires regular scrubbing thus I depend on spinning rust for long term cold storage so I use them for archival and backup.
22:30 It freakin' worked. Nice
Pick up a set of JIS screwdrivers. Unlike regular Phillips bits they don't have an angle in the bit design that is intended to make the bit cam out when you ramp up the torque. They 'bite' into the screw head better even when put into non JIS screws, just like the Posidrive tip does on your hammer drill you're using.
Pretty sure I remember low-leveling my RLL drive in my Kaypro back in the day using debug
My first 286vl with 10mb hddd had utility called shipzone to safely park the heads
I remember having an old Seagate ST-225 back in the day, but it was mashed into an Amstrad PC with a controller set to a config that I'm pretty sure were wrong for the drive because it reported the drive as 32MB and that is a 20MB drive. Needless to say that setup was far from reliable, but I was too young and inexperienced with PCs (XT actually) to know how to fix it. Later we attached the drive to an AT system and figured out that it was a 20MB drive and setting it right it started to actually work reliably. Go figure. 🙃 Still I am amazed that a drive from 40 years ago is still working reliably. That is amazing!
That was a pretty common "hack" back in the day. Just swap the MFM controller for an RLL one and you'll get 50% more space.
The only issue is: RLL drives have a higher quality magnetic surface, so using MFM drives like that will impact reliability.
Would have loved to have you run spinrite on the drive with original controller. It will check the interleave and also tell you what the optimum would be. AND, can change the interleave on the fly/no data loss.
35:14 depending on the MFM controller you can use debug.exe (which was on the disk) and then "G=C800:5" or "G=C800:800" or or "G=C800:CCC" or "G=C800:6" depending on the BIOS (on the controller or the motherboard).
17:17 - "Take off!"
This could very well be from a Compaq Portable Plus from 1983. That had a 10Mb HDD like the XT. That also meshes with it being type 1. The original PC HDD format!
The har drive looks chunky. I have a dell pentium 4 th desktop computer from 2003 and the pair of mechanical hd first that came with the dell desktop computer still working and the same that I added both hard drives still works perfectly
The high pitch noise that drive makes drives me crazy. It reminds me of an samsung ide drive I had back in the days!
Compatibility between Sata and ST506 might exist on a few drives but it would be difficult to test, you'd need a basic ide to sata adapter, plug it into an ide port and run a program to test ST506 commands to see what it does. Compatibilty will likely be only have a chance on 1st gen sata hard drives than anything newer. I really wouldn't expect sata backward compatibility to extend back before what is needed by ATA-1 with LBA28 (1994). Sata drives will likely just not work with direct CHS addressing from ST506 as it was declared obsolete a very long time ago.