Fascinating to see the internals of one of these. Quite unfortunate to see these have failed, given their absurd rarity these days. Another design with the crux of the degrading bumper, what a shame. As a whole, CDC/Imprimis drives in general are exceedingly rare over here in Europe; I think I've only seen one in person. Correlating to their market placement it makes sense, but it's a shame a lot of these will disappear with very little documentation of their existence remaining. Thanks for sharing.
Even in the States, outside of workstations they didn't appear too often. I have seen several with Apple badging, so they were probably available in high-end machines in the EU. It's too bad a lot of policies for computer resale involves destruction of the hard disk. It makes sense on newer multi-GB drives but a 400MB drive like this should only take an hour or so to run a multi-pass wipe. For what people charge for working SCSI drives on eBay you'd figure it would be worth the trouble.
Wow! This was an extremely interesting video, thanks so much for uploading it and taking the time to share what you noticed. I find it rather sad and unfortunate that you have two very similar drives, and they both had all of those issues shown and failed near identically. First thing was seems like some of the higher-end Seagate drives like those with that PCB design are just prone to failing, and the fact you had those two that both had the capacitors blow on the PCB supports that theory. Second and most sadly, I had no clue whatsoever that these had any sort of rubber stopper in them, and your act of uploading this video makes me glad to be aware of that issue as well. I believe what you said to have been the cause of death to be true, the bumpers melted, and when the drive would spin up it would grind down the heads and eventually cause them to dislodge or get damaged, and stiction possibly as well. I'm wondering, when you would turn the spindle by hand, did it feel it would hesitate and resist from the heads sticking? Or would you suggest that the bumper melting was what tore a few of the heads off as the drive would spin up and grind against the spindle? Hard for me to tell in the video really, something you would have to feel in person to likely know.
Thanks for watching. The 480 (first drive) worked briefly but then started making unhappy noises and died, most likely from having the heads dislocated by the spindle due to the failed bumper. The 581 was stuck when I got it, so I tried to free the platters by rotating the drive briskly. Sadly, this did less to free the heads from the platters than it did to liberate them from the ends of the armature, then the failed bumper caused the remaining heads to be damaged by the rotating spindle when it did spin up. Sad, really, because good SCSI drives are getting hard to find. I do have a part 2 video that I'll work on editing where I attempt to remove the failed bumper to replace it but there's very little room to work in there and risk of contamination is pretty high. Not that it matters, since the drive was dead, but it's a good exercise for trying it to preserve an otherwise good drive. I'm trying to improve on video shooting and editing. Maybe I'll be halfway decent at it someday.
@@fsfs555 Ah, thanks for letting me know! What surprised me was just how badly the bumper seems to have melted, almost seemed worse than on some Quantum drives where it got to the point of basically not existing anymore. Sad to hear about the ST1480N because it did work but unfortunately not long. Same with the ST1581N as I'm sure the drive themselves have good media, just those other issues that end up ruining them if not taken care of right away...I am considering picking one up, although I am fearful that the bumpers have melted on the working ones too and when they arrive and are powered on, the heads will get ruined making the drive unusable. Would like to see a video of attempting to replace the bumper even if it is not the easiest, I haven't seen anyone attempt that on these before. Also I really like your videos, just need to do more close-ups I think like when you are trying to show the damage or point of failure but otherwise you are very knowledgeable about these older drives.
Fascinating to see the internals of one of these. Quite unfortunate to see these have failed, given their absurd rarity these days. Another design with the crux of the degrading bumper, what a shame. As a whole, CDC/Imprimis drives in general are exceedingly rare over here in Europe; I think I've only seen one in person. Correlating to their market placement it makes sense, but it's a shame a lot of these will disappear with very little documentation of their existence remaining. Thanks for sharing.
Even in the States, outside of workstations they didn't appear too often. I have seen several with Apple badging, so they were probably available in high-end machines in the EU. It's too bad a lot of policies for computer resale involves destruction of the hard disk. It makes sense on newer multi-GB drives but a 400MB drive like this should only take an hour or so to run a multi-pass wipe. For what people charge for working SCSI drives on eBay you'd figure it would be worth the trouble.
Wow! This was an extremely interesting video, thanks so much for uploading it and taking the time to share what you noticed. I find it rather sad and unfortunate that you have two very similar drives, and they both had all of those issues shown and failed near identically. First thing was seems like some of the higher-end Seagate drives like those with that PCB design are just prone to failing, and the fact you had those two that both had the capacitors blow on the PCB supports that theory. Second and most sadly, I had no clue whatsoever that these had any sort of rubber stopper in them, and your act of uploading this video makes me glad to be aware of that issue as well. I believe what you said to have been the cause of death to be true, the bumpers melted, and when the drive would spin up it would grind down the heads and eventually cause them to dislodge or get damaged, and stiction possibly as well. I'm wondering, when you would turn the spindle by hand, did it feel it would hesitate and resist from the heads sticking? Or would you suggest that the bumper melting was what tore a few of the heads off as the drive would spin up and grind against the spindle? Hard for me to tell in the video really, something you would have to feel in person to likely know.
Thanks for watching. The 480 (first drive) worked briefly but then started making unhappy noises and died, most likely from having the heads dislocated by the spindle due to the failed bumper. The 581 was stuck when I got it, so I tried to free the platters by rotating the drive briskly. Sadly, this did less to free the heads from the platters than it did to liberate them from the ends of the armature, then the failed bumper caused the remaining heads to be damaged by the rotating spindle when it did spin up. Sad, really, because good SCSI drives are getting hard to find. I do have a part 2 video that I'll work on editing where I attempt to remove the failed bumper to replace it but there's very little room to work in there and risk of contamination is pretty high. Not that it matters, since the drive was dead, but it's a good exercise for trying it to preserve an otherwise good drive. I'm trying to improve on video shooting and editing. Maybe I'll be halfway decent at it someday.
@@fsfs555 Ah, thanks for letting me know! What surprised me was just how badly the bumper seems to have melted, almost seemed worse than on some Quantum drives where it got to the point of basically not existing anymore. Sad to hear about the ST1480N because it did work but unfortunately not long. Same with the ST1581N as I'm sure the drive themselves have good media, just those other issues that end up ruining them if not taken care of right away...I am considering picking one up, although I am fearful that the bumpers have melted on the working ones too and when they arrive and are powered on, the heads will get ruined making the drive unusable. Would like to see a video of attempting to replace the bumper even if it is not the easiest, I haven't seen anyone attempt that on these before. Also I really like your videos, just need to do more close-ups I think like when you are trying to show the damage or point of failure but otherwise you are very knowledgeable about these older drives.