• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

The Evolution of Hard Drives

Takes me back. Got my first one in 1985 - a 10MB Hardcard by Plus Development, a subsidiary of Quantum Corp. It fit into the expansion slot of my original IBM PC. Damn thing cost almost $1K. 🙂
 
I'm not saying my first hard drive was far noiser than a Plus Hardcard, but one time a construction crew of jack hammer operators said it kept them from concentrating on their work.
 
My first HDD was a 20MB 3.5" RLL beast had a stepper motor driving a rack and pinion setup that moved the heads. Not so much a speed demon when you can watch each seek operation...

Prior to that I used sticks and pebbles to store my 1's and 0's. And I liked it. Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!
 
My first system had a whopping 40mb drive. I mean used to, you had no hard drive led cable, because the led was built onto the front of the drive, and the drive had a plastic plate that actually became part of the case. I also remember the mid 90s quantum bigfoots! Does anyone remember those loud, speedy 4200 rpm beasts? By speedy of course I mean compared to a turtle dragging a 10 pound weight through a puddle of molasses lol...
 
Last edited:
My first job when I got out of the Navy was installing engineering updates to Sperry 7330 17 platter drive units. Basically I would remove/add/reroute those little jumper wires they used to use on backplanes back then using a removal tool and wire wrap gun.
 
corkyg said:
Takes me back. Got my first one in 1985 - a 10MB Hardcard by Plus Development, a subsidiary of Quantum Corp. It fit into the expansion slot of my original IBM PC. Damn thing cost almost $1K. 🙂
Click to expand...

Brings me back to the days about getting all excited about the Seagate ST225 40mb hard drive for under $250. Software like Spinrite.... memories........
 
Last edited:
anyone else remember using a RLL controller on a MFM drive? got me 30 megs from the 20 meg drive (ST225 I think)

fun times. took minutes for the drive to spin down after power off.. after manually parking the heads of course.
 
VeryCharBroiled said:
anyone else remember using a RLL controller on a MFM drive? got me 30 megs from the 20 meg drive (ST225 I think)

fun times. took minutes for the drive to spin down after power off.. after manually parking the heads of course.
Click to expand...
I had a 5.25" HD designed to spin down faster by applying a brake consisting of a felt band around the motor.

Seagate intentionally made its MFM drive unreliable with RLL by decreasing the cutoff frequency of a low-pass filter to cause excessive phase shift so the stricter timing requirements of RLL couldn't be met. Many people assumed the problem was inferior magnetic media and used Spinrite to mark off "bad" sectors, but this was never a good solution.
 
Just retired my last 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot drive last week. Has been running a small server for many years 24x7. Lots of upgrades over the years but finally it is too small to even load the OS.:thumbsdown:

Of course by now the RAM is bigger than the Bigfoot:\



86waterpumper said:
My first system had a whopping 40mb drive. I mean used to, you had no hard drive led cable, because the led was built onto the front of the drive, and the drive had a plastic plate that actually became part of the case. I also remember the mid 90s quantum bigfoots! Does anyone remember those loud, speedy 4200 rpm beasts? By speedy of course I mean compared to a turtle dragging a 10 pound weight through a puddle of molasses lol...
Click to expand...
 
One of the early hard drives I worked with was an HP 4 MB on an HP125 C/PM machine. It was divided in to 4 logical 1 MB drives to emulate the 8" 1 MB floppy drive on the same machine. Cost was over $3,000 in ?? 1980? or so.

I wrote a database in 8080 (Z80) assembler which was a good performer for the day. After loading the OS I only had about 34K bytes of memory to work in. Lots of pushes and pops😎 The system ran for many years for the business I wrote it for. They were happy despite the cost.

hal2kilo said:
Only single sided 8 inch 128k byte Shugart floppies.
Click to expand...
 
wirelessenabled said:
One of the early hard drives I worked with was an HP 4 MB on an HP125 C/PM machine. It was divided in to 4 logical 1 MB drives to emulate the 8" 1 MB floppy drive on the same machine. Cost was over $3,000 in ?? 1980? or so.

I wrote a database in 8080 (Z80) assembler which was a good performer for the day. After loading the OS I only had about 34K bytes of memory to work in. Lots of pushes and pops😎 The system ran for many years for the business I wrote it for. They were happy despite the cost.
Click to expand...

Supported a system that had 32K words of core memory that used program overlays loaded off a tape cartridge drive. All written in assembler. Sad thing is I'm supporting a 3rd generation system that does essentially the same thing, has probably 200 times the computing power and as far as software, although in a GUI, mouse driven format, has less capability than the old system that had a slightly less than 1 meg clock. High level OS's FTL and the state of programming art. Optimization? Minimum memory useage? What's that?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top