You were SUPER next level when you got your hands on a PARALLEL laplink cable (still own one of those), that was cooking with gas... Never seen a JVC HDD before but it does not surprise me in the slightest that they exist, very interesting construction though...
I think comparing it to 2 TB would be more fair... this was consumer grade stuff, not enterprise class (although it got deployed that way). Still five orders of magnitude.
Drive speed also sped up by 5 orders of magnitude. He demo'ed 570 KBps speed. Nowadays, Solidigm makes an SSD using U.2 (really is PCIe 4.0 4-lanes) that goes 7.1 GBps. There are likely some even faster drives out there. There are consumer-grade NVMe drives that are in the same ballpark. Note: "B" means bytes, not bits, in this case.
JVC had their own condensed interface which was somewhat like IDE. Sony made drives for a short while; their drives are most commonly found in Amstrad systems like the MegaPC. There was also Tokico who made some of the older Hitachi 3.5-inch drives. And yes Panasonic also made them, first as an OEM and then under contract for Quantum (most Quantum drives were actually made by them).
I've seen Sony mechanism on some early, 40 or 80 MB 3.5" Conner IDE drives. The platters in them are incredibly hard and light, I was unable to bend them in a vise with a pair of big water pump pliers. Maybe they are made of titanium.
@@douro20 Maybe titanium-aluminium-whatever alloy, something that is used for the frame of aircraft. It was so incredibly strong that I ended up putting one of the platters on the gas stove for tens of minutes. After that, I was still unable to bend it, but at least it broke. This was 20+ years ago, but I think I still have the other platter somewhere in a paper CD case.
Hard Drive name: "Volume in drive C is ASSHOLE". :) Isn't this the motherboard that had the broken ISA connector? It looks like the connector you were using for the video card was separated at one end toward the edge of the motherboard. You moved the 1st video card to a different slot and it worked. Then you put in back the original slot and it didn't work again. I went back and looked again at the 16 bit ISA slot, fourth slot over and is definitely broke!
Back when I bought my IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 the optional IBM HDD was reported to be slow as molasses. So I chose to buy the Plus Hardcard 40, which was the premium brand since it was the only card-type HDD that occupied a single expansion slot in width, whereas other vendors simply slapped a full-size drive onto a controller board and took up the space of two expansion slots. It worked beautifully. I later upgraded to the 105MB model, and never regretted the purchase.
In my first computer job, I had the task of assembling the Miniscribe version of these. I don't recall what they were labeled as, but we sold a metric shit-tonne of them. At that time the 32MB variety was the sweet spot. This design was nothing special except the backplane with standard RLL controller (8-bit) and an M8438. Cabling done with custom length control and data and a plastic clip to hold the cables inside the bracket. Miniscribe knew we were doing this, but what they didn't know was that the retail we charged on the card was between 35-50% higher than buying the bare drive and controller. Bracket cost a few dollars, and not more than 5 minute assembly. Was money!
Having just not hours earlier stabbed my hand with a screwdriver doing basically exactly what you did when prying at that connector on the hard drive board... I winced.
in my experience, the answer to "who was using an XT in 1997?" is that the machine had some weird hardware in it. Like I found an XT that was used in a PC repair shop, and they ran some PCB design/CAD software on the XT, clearly a decade after it was useful for anything else
Mountain Computer? Now there is a blast from the past. They made floppy disk duplicators that would let you stack dozens of floppies in a bin and it would automatically load and write to each. My father's company in Norway used these quite extensively. Fun hardware.
It's likely that the 8 bit ones didn't work with your AT because they aren't compatible with a bus faster than a 4.77MHz. that can cause random errors like the ones you saw. If the computer talked to the controller which was working correctly, it would return errors to DOS instead of just returning corrupt data. That's probably why the menu program disappeared too--the data was gone from the bus before the disk tried to grab it. The drive may not be asserting the ISA bus wait signal before the system expects it to be there.
Would be appreciated if he tested that out at least, certainly. Seems like it should be a relatively obvious consideration when dealing with expansion cards made for the 5150/5160.
Yepp, since Mountain disk hade same symptom. Since Adrian also said, I think, slightly overclocked, I have had 16 bit isa ide controller that didn't tolerate any isa bus overspeed
@@henriklarsson1389 That's part of what made it nice when IDE ports moved to the chipset. It eliminated a card, and they should always work at every FSB setting the board supports, even if a clock divider has to be applied.
I just remembered that Plus HardCards actually have an internal ST506 disk controller using a single-chip controller from Scientific Micro Systems, so they work very much like an old MFM/RLL drive. Norton Calibrate is also a very good utility for analyzing old ST506 interface drives, working very much like SpinRite. It actually works better for some things than SpinRite II does, like being able to adjust interleave on a drive whose controller uses dynamic translation.
The reason that the Plus HardCard acts so much like an IDE drive is because it WAS an early IDE drive. (IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics.) The 8 bit cards were a little more complex because they had to provide a BIOS. Your typical IDE card was just a couple of buffers for the PC bus. Some had a jumper to select primary/secondary interface. Actually, what we generally refer to as IDE is more correctly called the ATA (AT Attachment) interface. When SATA was developed, ATA became PATA (Parallel ATA).
Man, this brings back so many memories. Not good memories. Just because I can buckle down and spend an entire day testing which IRQ possibilities are usable with each card and then figure out which combinations work together doesn't mean I *ENJOYED* spending a ton of time debugging the basic operation of thousands of dollars of equipment. I mean, if it was like a bunch of random-ass test equipment, that would be one thing, but often it was trying to get basic stuff working, like a soundcard AND a mouse AND video AND a CD-ROM - who wants all that crazy advanced stuff?
I have seen where shadowing system bios and video bios causes issues with cards. I would try the hard cards without any memory shadow just to make sure there are no conflicts. I would not discard the drives until you disable these in the BIOS and retry.
Nice. One of my Tandy 1000s has a 20 Mb hard card that runs flawlessly. The old man I bought it from had that thing optioned to the hilt. It has everything.
I had bought a 30MB hard drive for my Tandy 1000a. It was a "HardCard"-type configuration, except that it was a regular 3.5" half-height drive. I had modded that system so much ny the time I retired it (multifunction memory/clock/serial board, NEC V20 processor, system clock accelerator, etc)
My experience with these back in the mid 1990s was about the same as you're seeing today. I think I've had 1 out of 20 maybe ever work reliably. Of course I had a repair shop, so people I guess only bring in broken stuff, but still.
Oh Adrian what a throwback. I totally remember these drives. I had a family friend who owned a local insurance company and he had a BUNCH of 5150 and old IBM 286 machines yeah the 5170, and I absolutely remember these being in the machines.. So neat!
When spinrite told me the drive was using translation, I would manually configure the drive to be the exact head/tract/sectors-per-tract to allow spinrite to lowlevel anyway.
51:30 Adrian we've jumped timelines man, see the tiny caps and resistors on the actual drive electronics as well, definitely not in '85 BEFORE - welcome to the new matrix man lol I did advanced electronics in 1989 full time and was working with surface mount "chips" in soldering classes but there weren't any eentsy surface mount caps or resistors even back then. Definitely a timeline shift.
very interesting. You're right that the stiction is a sign that the drive is on its way out. I remember a series of Quantum drives sold for the Mac (SCSI ones) that had a serious stiction problem and the issue showed up just a couple years later. It was then that I also learned about the percussive maintenance to temporarily resolve the issue. As long as ya kept them spinning all was good, but power off and cool down, and they'd stick again. As always - thanks for the entertainment on these relics!
1:01:10 Personally, I enjoy finding that kinds of stuff. I built my first computer when I was 11, in 1993. I would even dumpster dive from 93 till about 95 , especially in 95 as people would just throw away their computers or pick them up around dump sites. People would just drop them next to their trash bins on the side of the street or in alleys. I would even run home and get my father to drive back if things were just too heavy. He even procured a cart with heavy wheels that I would use to drag it all home with. It always fascinated me to see what people were doing with their computers. I of course never did anything with it, but it was so interesting to see. I was mainly happy to 1) get scrap parts to test, sort and use to build/addon to the computer I had or 2) get software to tinker with. Even today, when I run into the odd HDD here and there, I still like seeing the history of its use, who why when... interesting stuff.
The JVC looked like it had 26 pin connector typically used in Toshiba T1200 and Victor V86 laptops. Mid to late 80's machines. Notorious for failing hard drives.
Exactly, mine was not spinning up until forced manually that head moving wheel by a 1/4 turn after powering it up. That spinning up sound on totally silent laptop was iconic every time.
33:38 ERLL is Enhanced RLL and Spinrite's RLL or MFM test patterns work just fine. They put more bytes of data on drives than standard RLL and still use the 2,7 RLL data encoding... this drive is essentially permanently "married" to the chipset on the board and can't even have parts swapped out because of "tuning" of the disk to the controller as manufactured.
Way back in the day, we had a 386SX/16 Tandon PC with a 40 meg hard drive. My dad bought a massive 100mb smart card when we eventually needed more space. The card in question had a SCSI 3.5" drive on it with a matching controller which presumably was their way of getting around the issue of it working with an existing IDE controller. If I recall it was an NCR SCSI bios! That card worked for years before the drive died and I replaced it with another SCSI hard drive I found in a skip 😂
I built my own LapLink LPT cable with the ' high speed ' 13 pins. It was at least twice the speed of the COM cable link. The pinout should still be on the internet.
Love that thumbnail.. what a blast from the past. Reminded me of "back in the day" where my CompSci teach actually let me pack one up and take it home during the holidays circa 1988. Keep em coming..
lol. Yes I am still watching and No! I've never heard of a JVC hard drive before but that is the BEST looking hard drive I have ever seen! Mounting the platter to the PCB. Work of art!
I had a IBM 5150 that I put a Plus Hard Card into, I had a friend that worked at a college computer lab they were replacing their 5150s and some of them had 20MB Hard Cards, I also got an 8087 math coprocessor as well.
I knew JVC drives existed and funnily I spoke with other collectors about them not long ago, and I had my mind blown when they told me the PCB was the bottom of the drive on some of them. And then I see one being taken appart here, crazy! Looks like that NEC drive (the one from the 5th card) was perfect but it ended up marking that "false" bad track from the pre-LLF read attempt. I wonder if the missbehaving 8-bit cards would work properly on an XT.
I had a Plus HardCard 20 in a Compaq Portable that my uncle gave me decades ago. It never worked unfortunately, the head had quite literally fused to the platter. When I pried it up, it ripped a chunk out of the platter with it. But the controller did still work, and there was a telltale sign that the HardCard was installed, the Option ROM put text in the top left of the screen, which just had "Plus+" and it would flash when it was trying to access the drive. Maybe the code doesn't work on newer PCs, which is why it doesn't show up.
21:55 i love the hdd volume naming lol lovely taste ha ha ha and at 50:00 no it was already broken and we could see the big crack in the cover at the beginning of the video so it isn't you that broke it.
Stiction is normally a reference to the oil in the bearings cooking. The hit should be done with a small hammer with the hard drive on a desk. This will assure that there is no vertical acceleration of the heads. Was doing this to conner and quantum drives back in the 90s!
At the time I read that stiction was the result of heads getting so smooth by frequent landing on the disk surfaces that some adhesive effect ensued. Problem was solved by creating a laser-textured landing zone (before headlifts came into play).
As for Interleave, from what I remember it was basically how much extra space you'd leave after each read/write before attempting another. If you had a slower computer you needed a higher interleave because by the time it got done with one write the "next" one had already passed the head, so the drive had to wait an entire rotation. If you had a fast PC, you could set Interleave to 1. I'm not sure about that version of SpinRite, but some versions could actually do a test to see what the optimal interleave setting was, and even rewrite the entire disk without losing any data. The thing with interleave is it wasn't only dependent on the drive and controller combination, but the system as well. If you had a faster 286 and set the interleave on that system, then moved the drive/controller to an XT, it would perform even slower than it could be. Without a utility to test for optimal interleave your just had to guess and measure speed yourself to see what the best one was.
We had the hard cards in the XT computers in my college computer lab back in the late 80’s computer science department. Interesting to see these broken down, good video Adrian!
Everything on that JVC drives screams crude. It really looks like a prototype drive that was pushed into production. All of those variable resistors/caps/inductors whatever they are, are going to drift over time and indicate problematic/inconsistent manufacturing. You can also see what appears to be a speed sensor on the main spindle (toothed wheel with the little vertical board under the platter) and read/write assembly - something I've never seen in any other drive. All of those various layers of boards, wires and other components would take a tremendous about of very expensive hand-assembly.
Those Plus drives, if you fix the stop buffers also suffer from the rubber outgassing inside the enclosure. That gets onto the little glass sector which is the position feedback, works the same as a mouse and with the light passing through being scattered makes them slow and unreliable to seek. Cleaning that up carefully will get them back up to speed.
When my hard card died it flashed S.O.S. on the HDD light. I thought that was kind of cool and unique for equipment of the time to actually tell you it needs help.
Basic low level formatting is write only task. No confirmation is made that the process was successful. Similarly you can format a piece of cardboard on an apple floppy drive. Creating a partition successfully requires a working head zero, track zero, sector zero to be working. If it's bad all these operations will fail BUT there is a workaround for some drives. The type of drive, like a Seagate, with the stepper motor mounted externally that rotates at 90 degrees to the disk has a knife on the shaft that cuts an optical sensor. This determines when it has backed out to track zero. If you unscrew the hex bolt on the shaft and rotate it a tiny amount and then tighten it again it will index out to a different point. There are spare tracks at the end of the drive so if you move it a tiny amount you shouldn't hit the middle of the disk. You can then use the controller's built in C800:5 format routine to low level format it and end up with a new head zero, track zero, sector zero that will take a partition descriptor. There is no servo track used for where the tracks are found so this will work if you move it a tiny amount. However you will need to check the drive for bad sectors before using it. - Now, are you are wondering how may salvageable drives you have thrown away that wouldn't take a partition table..?
What would be cool but entirely pointless, is to convert one of these to a flash drive. Not sure how it could be done but it would be awesome. Saw the slots on the second one he showed and just gave me the idea.
A hard drive named "A**H*LE". Must've been owned by Brad Majors (Rocky Horror Picture Show reference). Reminds me of the first scene in the movie, "Maximum Overdrive", where Stephen King makes a cameo as a guy trying to make a withdrawal at an ATM.
On the first hardcard there's a jumper that's labelled 'XT/PC' and it was set to XT. When you were comparing the two cards @17:20 I noticed that on the other card this is '1st/2nd'. Maybe since you're using a PC(286) you need to swap this jumper?
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to resurrect a Plus HardCard? I've seen Quantum drives of the same era resurrected with good results. The HardCard, if I'm not mistaken, is very similar inside to a lot of the earlier Quantum ProDrives.
I actually like the design of the jvc drive cost effective construction very straightforward read write head. Definitely the most interesting drive i have seen and i took apart a lot of drives.
Oh god that JVC Drive! D: I just finished reviving a GRiDcase 3 from VCF West that had one of those. Mine still thankfully works but the drive auto-parks after five seconds and the lock solenoid constantly clicks because of how much it parks and un-parks. The sounds it makes are absolutely horrific.
Laplink 3 and the Direct Access menu software both bring back lots of memories - Dad installed the latter to make the system a bit more "childproof", until my three year old brother was able to figure out the passwords by watching him enter them. I've still got the parallel port cable we used to use with it stored away somewhere - it made it easy to transfer Doom WAD files for local deathmatches.
That motherboard stress relief is something I didn't run into until recently when I ditched my game consoles to game on my PC instead. The ridiculous 2 and a half slot GPU that weighs a ton(at least by expansion card standard) and has 3 massive fans on it has no such support and I had to fashion some myself.
I've had the occasional MFM hard drive that refused to format when placed upside down ie. PCB up. The documentation (if available) said that they would only work upright or on either of their sides. Your Mountain drive didn't seem to mind, but others might.
Another problem with the Plus HardCards is that the firmware ROMs can actually fail over time and lose their programming. That's what killed the HardCard I used to have in my AT&T PC many years ago. Regarding JVC hard drives, I have a Toshiba T3100 and T2100 that both have JVC drives, one 10MB and the other 20MB. I've heard the T1200 also uses them. The 20MB one has a very unique sound when running, and the heads automatically park after a few seconds of drive inactivity.
I have a hardcard 40 and the rubber stopper inside the drive where the heads park against, has turned to a rubbery goo , so the heads get stuck into that goo, if you tap the drive on the edge while powering it up, it will break free and will work until you put the computer away till next time and have to tap it again.
Hard cards were a great concept that turned out to be a really stupid idea in practice. The vibration caused so many premature failures compared to a normally mounted drive, or even if you just securely fastened the drive to the chassis so the board wasn't its sole (or even primary) means of support -- kinda like propping up a sagging video card is today. I had a "turned to goo" moment just a few hours ago. I was looking through a drawer for AA batteries and the rubber band holding them together had utterly liquified and all the batteries were coated in goo, as were my fingers. As for the rather amusing volume name, it might have been used for accounting -- and at the time in the PC business, that word was shorthand for "anyone who hasn't paid us yet". Even if they had credit terms, their status was "a**hole" until they paid, which meant any further credit could not be extended without consulting Accounting who would then go look up the Accounts Receivable, aka "the a**hole file". That may have been what this drive was used for.
Those hard cards are a bit reminiscent of the "side-car" HDD enclosures that plugged on to the Zorro bus edge connector within the left hand side of the Amiga 500s. Whilst I'm not a fan of the spinning noises of some of the early HDDs, what I _did_ like was the sound of the stepper-motor controlling the heads on the quieter full-height HDDs often fitted to XT clones.
This could have been another hour and I would have watched it all. Love these autopsy video,s especially on equipment notorious for failure like these hard cards. Remember nothing about them except "avoid them, they break." Which I hated because they were such a cool idea.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
And that 1701(D) error, well, that's a Galaxy Class way to go, very Enterprising....... :P
I saw that and was.....wait, what?
hahaha yes indeed I didn't noticed that at first, thanks for pointing out, I'm a huge fan of old Star Trek my self. :)
I'm so sad to see an error on my favorite Enterprise.
the dive has failed... "Make it so"
Take your upvote and get out.
You were SUPER next level when you got your hands on a PARALLEL laplink cable (still own one of those), that was cooking with gas...
Never seen a JVC HDD before but it does not surprise me in the slightest that they exist, very interesting construction though...
I have both the parallel and the serial laplink cables, in the laplink box, no media, but it's in the box, with the manual.
That hard drive volume was most accurately named! I am one of those suckers for that noisy spinning rust nostalgia.
BIOS first line also has to say a few things.
@21:56 Volume in drive C: is ASSHOLE. "Well that's a bummer"
That killed me! Still giggling about it. 18 year son found it funny too. Wife...not so much...
I give my drives fun names, but that one is special 😂
@@TheZcoffin I'd say it's spectacular!!!
That JVC HDD was a trip - glad that you're saving it. Interesting moire pattern on the surface of the platter as you moved it around too.
this JVC hdd construction is really one of a kind. i didn't expect such an interesting drive on a "boring" filecard.
Can you imagine? We went from 20MB to 20TB. Six orders of magnitude.
I think comparing it to 2 TB would be more fair... this was consumer grade stuff, not enterprise class (although it got deployed that way). Still five orders of magnitude.
@@mal2ksc I have 14 TB NAS drives, very consumer.
My first Mac had a 10MB HDD. My home network NAS is 120TB
Drive speed also sped up by 5 orders of magnitude. He demo'ed 570 KBps speed. Nowadays, Solidigm makes an SSD using U.2 (really is PCIe 4.0 4-lanes) that goes 7.1 GBps. There are likely some even faster drives out there. There are consumer-grade NVMe drives that are in the same ballpark.
Note: "B" means bytes, not bits, in this case.
First computer C-64, current computer 64 GB RAM. Also 6 orders.
I worked in IT from the late 80's, and I don't recall any JVC hard drives. That was a very unique drive design for sure.
JVC had their own condensed interface which was somewhat like IDE. Sony made drives for a short while; their drives are most commonly found in Amstrad systems like the MegaPC. There was also Tokico who made some of the older Hitachi 3.5-inch drives. And yes Panasonic also made them, first as an OEM and then under contract for Quantum (most Quantum drives were actually made by them).
I've seen Sony mechanism on some early, 40 or 80 MB 3.5" Conner IDE drives. The platters in them are incredibly hard and light, I was unable to bend them in a vise with a pair of big water pump pliers. Maybe they are made of titanium.
@@mrnmrn1 No, I've worked with titanium...it's not that rigid. It could be a special aluminium alloy.
@@douro20 Maybe titanium-aluminium-whatever alloy, something that is used for the frame of aircraft. It was so incredibly strong that I ended up putting one of the platters on the gas stove for tens of minutes. After that, I was still unable to bend it, but at least it broke. This was 20+ years ago, but I think I still have the other platter somewhere in a paper CD case.
@21:56 Given the drive label, I expect the previous owner had similar problems.
Hard Drive name: "Volume in drive C is ASSHOLE". :) Isn't this the motherboard that had the broken ISA connector? It looks like the connector you were using for the video card was separated at one end toward the edge of the motherboard. You moved the 1st video card to a different slot and it worked. Then you put in back the original slot and it didn't work again. I went back and looked again at the 16 bit ISA slot, fourth slot over and is definitely broke!
I LOL'ed when I saw that at 21:53
Back when I bought my IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 the optional IBM HDD was reported to be slow as molasses. So I chose to buy the Plus Hardcard 40, which was the premium brand since it was the only card-type HDD that occupied a single expansion slot in width, whereas other vendors simply slapped a full-size drive onto a controller board and took up the space of two expansion slots. It worked beautifully. I later upgraded to the 105MB model, and never regretted the purchase.
I was an office manager for a company full of traveling sales reps who all had laptops. I lived in laplink!
In my first computer job, I had the task of assembling the Miniscribe version of these. I don't recall what they were labeled as, but we sold a metric shit-tonne of them. At that time the 32MB variety was the sweet spot. This design was nothing special except the backplane with standard RLL controller (8-bit) and an M8438. Cabling done with custom length control and data and a plastic clip to hold the cables inside the bracket. Miniscribe knew we were doing this, but what they didn't know was that the retail we charged on the card was between 35-50% higher than buying the bare drive and controller. Bracket cost a few dollars, and not more than 5 minute assembly. Was money!
That is so bizarre, I've never seen a HD look remotely like that on the inside and I've pulled apart plenty in my time.
Having just not hours earlier stabbed my hand with a screwdriver doing basically exactly what you did when prying at that connector on the hard drive board... I winced.
Good call. Always point away from yourself, and make sure you don't have your hand in the path of stabbing in case you slip.
Sounds painful and gory af, wish you a fast recovery.
@@offspringfan89 Looked like a murder scene. :D Especially the shirt I was wearing. Thank you.
ZAJEBISTY temat Adrianku, uwielbiam oglądać takie filmy 👍🍻
in my experience, the answer to "who was using an XT in 1997?" is that the machine had some weird hardware in it. Like I found an XT that was used in a PC repair shop, and they ran some PCB design/CAD software on the XT, clearly a decade after it was useful for anything else
This was very entertaining. It brought back so many good (and sometimes frustratingly good) memories. Thank you. Great content!
Mountain Computer? Now there is a blast from the past. They made floppy disk duplicators that would let you stack dozens of floppies in a bin and it would automatically load and write to each. My father's company in Norway used these quite extensively. Fun hardware.
It's likely that the 8 bit ones didn't work with your AT because they aren't compatible with a bus faster than a 4.77MHz. that can cause random errors like the ones you saw. If the computer talked to the controller which was working correctly, it would return errors to DOS instead of just returning corrupt data. That's probably why the menu program disappeared too--the data was gone from the bus before the disk tried to grab it. The drive may not be asserting the ISA bus wait signal before the system expects it to be there.
Would be appreciated if he tested that out at least, certainly. Seems like it should be a relatively obvious consideration when dealing with expansion cards made for the 5150/5160.
Yepp, since Mountain disk hade same symptom. Since Adrian also said, I think, slightly overclocked, I have had 16 bit isa ide controller that didn't tolerate any isa bus overspeed
@@henriklarsson1389 That's part of what made it nice when IDE ports moved to the chipset. It eliminated a card, and they should always work at every FSB setting the board supports, even if a clock divider has to be applied.
It's always a pleasure to see you get the giggles from all the interesting things you discover during your videos. Please never change :)
I just remembered that Plus HardCards actually have an internal ST506 disk controller using a single-chip controller from Scientific Micro Systems, so they work very much like an old MFM/RLL drive.
Norton Calibrate is also a very good utility for analyzing old ST506 interface drives, working very much like SpinRite. It actually works better for some things than SpinRite II does, like being able to adjust interleave on a drive whose controller uses dynamic translation.
The most fascinating thing about this whole video was the JVC hard drive.
The reason that the Plus HardCard acts so much like an IDE drive is because it WAS an early IDE drive. (IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics.) The 8 bit cards were a little more complex because they had to provide a BIOS. Your typical IDE card was just a couple of buffers for the PC bus. Some had a jumper to select primary/secondary interface.
Actually, what we generally refer to as IDE is more correctly called the ATA (AT Attachment) interface. When SATA was developed, ATA became PATA (Parallel ATA).
Man, this brings back so many memories. Not good memories. Just because I can buckle down and spend an entire day testing which IRQ possibilities are usable with each card and then figure out which combinations work together doesn't mean I *ENJOYED* spending a ton of time debugging the basic operation of thousands of dollars of equipment. I mean, if it was like a bunch of random-ass test equipment, that would be one thing, but often it was trying to get basic stuff working, like a soundcard AND a mouse AND video AND a CD-ROM - who wants all that crazy advanced stuff?
I have seen where shadowing system bios and video bios causes issues with cards. I would try the hard cards without any memory shadow just to make sure there are no conflicts. I would not discard the drives until you disable these in the BIOS and retry.
I've definitely never seen a JVC hard drive in any vintage computer before. Had no idea they even made them, honestly!
In order to use _ANY_ card that has an option ROM in a 5150, you have to be running the October 1982 BIOS, or newer.
i have never heard of a JVC HDD but that is exactly what i would have expected one to look like
black brick with crazy overcomplicated circuitry
Nice. One of my Tandy 1000s has a 20 Mb hard card that runs flawlessly. The old man I bought it from had that thing optioned to the hilt. It has everything.
I had bought a 30MB hard drive for my Tandy 1000a. It was a "HardCard"-type configuration, except that it was a regular 3.5" half-height drive. I had modded that system so much ny the time I retired it (multifunction memory/clock/serial board, NEC V20 processor, system clock accelerator, etc)
My experience with these back in the mid 1990s was about the same as you're seeing today. I think I've had 1 out of 20 maybe ever work reliably. Of course I had a repair shop, so people I guess only bring in broken stuff, but still.
Oh Adrian what a throwback. I totally remember these drives. I had a family friend who owned a local insurance company and he had a BUNCH of 5150 and old IBM 286 machines yeah the 5170, and I absolutely remember these being in the machines.. So neat!
When spinrite told me the drive was using translation, I would manually configure the drive to be the exact head/tract/sectors-per-tract to allow spinrite to lowlevel anyway.
51:30 Adrian we've jumped timelines man, see the tiny caps and resistors on the actual drive electronics as well, definitely not in '85 BEFORE - welcome to the new matrix man lol I did advanced electronics in 1989 full time and was working with surface mount "chips" in soldering classes but there weren't any eentsy surface mount caps or resistors even back then. Definitely a timeline shift.
that JVC just looks like somebody tried to anticipate a CDrom drive.
very interesting. You're right that the stiction is a sign that the drive is on its way out. I remember a series of Quantum drives sold for the Mac (SCSI ones) that had a serious stiction problem and the issue showed up just a couple years later. It was then that I also learned about the percussive maintenance to temporarily resolve the issue. As long as ya kept them spinning all was good, but power off and cool down, and they'd stick again. As always - thanks for the entertainment on these relics!
yup Apple released a tech bulletin about the Mac SE and stiction that basically said power up... hold HDD 2 inches above desk and drop it...
1:01:10 Personally, I enjoy finding that kinds of stuff. I built my first computer when I was 11, in 1993. I would even dumpster dive from 93 till about 95 , especially in 95 as people would just throw away their computers or pick them up around dump sites. People would just drop them next to their trash bins on the side of the street or in alleys. I would even run home and get my father to drive back if things were just too heavy. He even procured a cart with heavy wheels that I would use to drag it all home with. It always fascinated me to see what people were doing with their computers. I of course never did anything with it, but it was so interesting to see. I was mainly happy to 1) get scrap parts to test, sort and use to build/addon to the computer I had or 2) get software to tinker with. Even today, when I run into the odd HDD here and there, I still like seeing the history of its use, who why when... interesting stuff.
The JVC looked like it had 26 pin connector typically used in Toshiba T1200 and Victor V86 laptops. Mid to late 80's machines. Notorious for failing hard drives.
Exactly, mine was not spinning up until forced manually that head moving wheel by a 1/4 turn after powering it up. That spinning up sound on totally silent laptop was iconic every time.
I thought Victor was JVC?
Love this video ❤
33:38 ERLL is Enhanced RLL and Spinrite's RLL or MFM test patterns work just fine. They put more bytes of data on drives than standard RLL and still use the 2,7 RLL data encoding... this drive is essentially permanently "married" to the chipset on the board and can't even have parts swapped out because of "tuning" of the disk to the controller as manufactured.
In college, I can remember spending $250 on a 20MB replacement hard drive for my Mac SE. As a student, that hurt.
Way back in the day, we had a 386SX/16 Tandon PC with a 40 meg hard drive. My dad bought a massive 100mb smart card when we eventually needed more space. The card in question had a SCSI 3.5" drive on it with a matching controller which presumably was their way of getting around the issue of it working with an existing IDE controller. If I recall it was an NCR SCSI bios! That card worked for years before the drive died and I replaced it with another SCSI hard drive I found in a skip 😂
I built my own LapLink LPT cable with the ' high speed ' 13 pins. It was at least twice the speed of the COM cable link. The pinout should still be on the internet.
Love that thumbnail.. what a blast from the past. Reminded me of "back in the day" where my CompSci teach actually let me pack one up and take it home during the holidays circa 1988. Keep em coming..
lol. Yes I am still watching and No! I've never heard of a JVC hard drive before but that is the BEST looking hard drive I have ever seen! Mounting the platter to the PCB. Work of art!
Those Plus cards looked so nice.
Percussive Maintenance = If at first you don't succeed, us a bigger hammer.
Pretty much! 😂
Informative trip back to the past. I have never seen a JVC hard drive, but knew they made them.
I had a IBM 5150 that I put a Plus Hard Card into, I had a friend that worked at a college computer lab they were replacing their 5150s and some of them had 20MB Hard Cards, I also got an 8087 math coprocessor as well.
20:20 that menu system looks very familiar, I think I had one exactly like it on a shareware cd.
I knew JVC drives existed and funnily I spoke with other collectors about them not long ago, and I had my mind blown when they told me the PCB was the bottom of the drive on some of them. And then I see one being taken appart here, crazy! Looks like that NEC drive (the one from the 5th card) was perfect but it ended up marking that "false" bad track from the pre-LLF read attempt. I wonder if the missbehaving 8-bit cards would work properly on an XT.
Loved the video. Even if something is broken you can still learn from it.
I really enjoy these "meandering kind of videos" they are super mesmerizing, that JVC drive at the end blew my mind
That JVC is the strangest hard drive I've ever seen.
Translucent sleeved IDE cables, just like a true gamer
I had a Plus HardCard 20 in a Compaq Portable that my uncle gave me decades ago. It never worked unfortunately, the head had quite literally fused to the platter. When I pried it up, it ripped a chunk out of the platter with it.
But the controller did still work, and there was a telltale sign that the HardCard was installed, the Option ROM put text in the top left of the screen, which just had "Plus+" and it would flash when it was trying to access the drive. Maybe the code doesn't work on newer PCs, which is why it doesn't show up.
21:55 i love the hdd volume naming lol lovely taste ha ha ha and at 50:00 no it was already broken and we could see the big crack in the cover at the beginning of the video so it isn't you that broke it.
That JVC hard drive is quite interesting!
Stiction is normally a reference to the oil in the bearings cooking. The hit should be done with a small hammer with the hard drive on a desk. This will assure that there is no vertical acceleration of the heads. Was doing this to conner and quantum drives back in the 90s!
At the time I read that stiction was the result of heads getting so smooth by frequent landing on the disk surfaces that some adhesive effect ensued. Problem was solved by creating a laser-textured landing zone (before headlifts came into play).
I have been messing with computers for decades and I have never heard of a JVC HDD.
Not sure if anyone else mentioned it, but the HardCard vibrations are likely the cause of the Keyboard Controller IC popping out.
As for Interleave, from what I remember it was basically how much extra space you'd leave after each read/write before attempting another. If you had a slower computer you needed a higher interleave because by the time it got done with one write the "next" one had already passed the head, so the drive had to wait an entire rotation. If you had a fast PC, you could set Interleave to 1. I'm not sure about that version of SpinRite, but some versions could actually do a test to see what the optimal interleave setting was, and even rewrite the entire disk without losing any data.
The thing with interleave is it wasn't only dependent on the drive and controller combination, but the system as well. If you had a faster 286 and set the interleave on that system, then moved the drive/controller to an XT, it would perform even slower than it could be. Without a utility to test for optimal interleave your just had to guess and measure speed yourself to see what the best one was.
We had the hard cards in the XT computers in my college computer lab back in the late 80’s computer science department. Interesting to see these broken down, good video Adrian!
That JVC drive is from an alternate timeline!
Everything on that JVC drives screams crude. It really looks like a prototype drive that was pushed into production. All of those variable resistors/caps/inductors whatever they are, are going to drift over time and indicate problematic/inconsistent manufacturing. You can also see what appears to be a speed sensor on the main spindle (toothed wheel with the little vertical board under the platter) and read/write assembly - something I've never seen in any other drive. All of those various layers of boards, wires and other components would take a tremendous about of very expensive hand-assembly.
Those Plus drives, if you fix the stop buffers also suffer from the rubber outgassing inside the enclosure. That gets onto the little glass sector which is the position feedback, works the same as a mouse and with the light passing through being scattered makes them slow and unreliable to seek. Cleaning that up carefully will get them back up to speed.
When my hard card died it flashed S.O.S. on the HDD light. I thought that was kind of cool and unique for equipment of the time to actually tell you it needs help.
I love the error number in 43:37 , "1701 (D)".
It's scary, but after all these years, I remember base address 300.
never seen a jvc hard drive b4 what a cool thing to just sit on a shelf and look at
Basic low level formatting is write only task. No confirmation is made that the process was successful. Similarly you can format a piece of cardboard on an apple floppy drive.
Creating a partition successfully requires a working head zero, track zero, sector zero to be working. If it's bad all these operations will fail BUT there is a workaround for some drives.
The type of drive, like a Seagate, with the stepper motor mounted externally that rotates at 90 degrees to the disk has a knife on the shaft that cuts an optical sensor.
This determines when it has backed out to track zero. If you unscrew the hex bolt on the shaft and rotate it a tiny amount and then tighten it again it will index out to a different point.
There are spare tracks at the end of the drive so if you move it a tiny amount you shouldn't hit the middle of the disk.
You can then use the controller's built in C800:5 format routine to low level format it and end up with a new head zero, track zero, sector zero that will take a partition descriptor.
There is no servo track used for where the tracks are found so this will work if you move it a tiny amount. However you will need to check the drive for bad sectors before using it.
- Now, are you are wondering how may salvageable drives you have thrown away that wouldn't take a partition table..?
22:00 wonder if gets glitchy when hot? maybe some cooling?
Ahhh memories, my 1st PC was an 8088 8mhz with a 10MB hard card and dual 5.25 floppies.
What would be cool but entirely pointless, is to convert one of these to a flash drive. Not sure how it could be done but it would be awesome. Saw the slots on the second one he showed and just gave me the idea.
I'm so excited, I need to get an image of my hard card to go on my picomem i got for my compaq luggable XT. Crossing my fingers for a solution.
59:33 This would make a good ring tone or message tone! ☎️📝
A hard drive named "A**H*LE". Must've been owned by Brad Majors (Rocky Horror Picture Show reference).
Reminds me of the first scene in the movie, "Maximum Overdrive", where Stephen King makes a cameo as a guy trying to make a withdrawal at an ATM.
Brilliant. I enjoyed that.
Love the old hard drive videos. Might be junky but makes for good content.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge 👍 👏 🤖
On the first hardcard there's a jumper that's labelled 'XT/PC' and it was set to XT. When you were comparing the two cards @17:20 I noticed that on the other card this is '1st/2nd'. Maybe since you're using a PC(286) you need to swap this jumper?
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to resurrect a Plus HardCard? I've seen Quantum drives of the same era resurrected with good results.
The HardCard, if I'm not mistaken, is very similar inside to a lot of the earlier Quantum ProDrives.
I actually like the design of the jvc drive cost effective construction very straightforward read write head. Definitely the most interesting drive i have seen and i took apart a lot of drives.
Man I really enjoyed this one, fell asleep to it last night, I think it was on par with some of LGRs relaxing videos
Oh god that JVC Drive! D:
I just finished reviving a GRiDcase 3 from VCF West that had one of those. Mine still thankfully works but the drive auto-parks after five seconds and the lock solenoid constantly clicks because of how much it parks and un-parks. The sounds it makes are absolutely horrific.
Laplink 3 and the Direct Access menu software both bring back lots of memories - Dad installed the latter to make the system a bit more "childproof", until my three year old brother was able to figure out the passwords by watching him enter them. I've still got the parallel port cable we used to use with it stored away somewhere - it made it easy to transfer Doom WAD files for local deathmatches.
Midnight Rescue!!! I haven't thought about that game in ages. Such wonderful, wonderful memories!
I enjoy your meandering videos. Create as many as you'd like.
That Western Digital 82 MB drive working in 2024 is like ENIAC 1 from 1945 working in 1984. With no maintenance done one it.
That motherboard stress relief is something I didn't run into until recently when I ditched my game consoles to game on my PC instead. The ridiculous 2 and a half slot GPU that weighs a ton(at least by expansion card standard) and has 3 massive fans on it has no such support and I had to fashion some myself.
I've had the occasional MFM hard drive that refused to format when placed upside down ie. PCB up. The documentation (if available) said that they would only work upright or on either of their sides. Your Mountain drive didn't seem to mind, but others might.
the JVC honestly looks like a VCR company tried to make a hard drive.
Another problem with the Plus HardCards is that the firmware ROMs can actually fail over time and lose their programming. That's what killed the HardCard I used to have in my AT&T PC many years ago.
Regarding JVC hard drives, I have a Toshiba T3100 and T2100 that both have JVC drives, one 10MB and the other 20MB. I've heard the T1200 also uses them. The 20MB one has a very unique sound when running, and the heads automatically park after a few seconds of drive inactivity.
I have a hardcard 40 and the rubber stopper inside the drive where the heads park against, has turned to a rubbery goo , so the heads get stuck into that goo, if you tap the drive on the edge while powering it up, it will break free and will work until you put the computer away till next time and have to tap it again.
Hard cards were a great concept that turned out to be a really stupid idea in practice. The vibration caused so many premature failures compared to a normally mounted drive, or even if you just securely fastened the drive to the chassis so the board wasn't its sole (or even primary) means of support -- kinda like propping up a sagging video card is today.
I had a "turned to goo" moment just a few hours ago. I was looking through a drawer for AA batteries and the rubber band holding them together had utterly liquified and all the batteries were coated in goo, as were my fingers.
As for the rather amusing volume name, it might have been used for accounting -- and at the time in the PC business, that word was shorthand for "anyone who hasn't paid us yet". Even if they had credit terms, their status was "a**hole" until they paid, which meant any further credit could not be extended without consulting Accounting who would then go look up the Accounts Receivable, aka "the a**hole file". That may have been what this drive was used for.
41:23 I heard somebody from Chips & Tech shouting at their screen "I said explicitly to not disassemble the BIOS!"
On the positive side, old hard disk platters make great wind chimes.
Hi, I paid $2k AUD for an 80MB HDD card for an Amiga back in the day - still have that machine!
Those hard cards are a bit reminiscent of the "side-car" HDD enclosures that plugged on to the Zorro bus edge connector within the left hand side of the Amiga 500s.
Whilst I'm not a fan of the spinning noises of some of the early HDDs, what I _did_ like was the sound of the stepper-motor controlling the heads on the quieter full-height HDDs often fitted to XT clones.
This could have been another hour and I would have watched it all. Love these autopsy video,s especially on equipment notorious for failure like these hard cards. Remember nothing about them except "avoid them, they break." Which I hated because they were such a cool idea.