Extremely Old 4 Megabyte HD. How to hook up?

Hey, My teacher gave me an extremely old hard drive when cleaning up his old stuff. The hard drive looks ancient but probably still works fine. The model name is Seagate ST-4096. I would guestimate it's 4 megabytes in size. The thing is really huge too. It's would take up two 5.25 inch bays probably.
I want to hook it up just out of curiosity to see if it still works and what's on it. I have no idea what interface it uses or how to power it. Where could I get the necessary controllers and adapters for it? Can anyone help me out?

I'll post pictures of the hard drive as soon as I set up my web space again.

edit:
here are the pics:
(warning modem users --- each pic is ~150-200kb)
http://c0d3x.homestead.com/files/pic_008.jpg

http://c0d3x.homestead.com/files/pic_009.jpg

http://c0d3x.homestead.com/files/pic_010.jpg

http://c0d3x.homestead.com/files/pic_011.jpg

ha ha ha ha ha.
Now you know why modern day hard drives are still called "half height". I have no idea what connector that drive uses. Search the Seagate website they have all the info./

i may be wrong but i think its a dmf hd its been a while. if you take it apart there will be a mean stack of platters in there:eek:

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Originally posted by meat322
i may be wrong but i think its a dmf hd its been a while. if you take it apart there will be a mean stack of platters in there:eek:

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BTW: Its MFM or RLL :)

From the pics I would say its a MFM drive :)

You need a proprietary controller to run it. And your floppy drive might be faster then that drive :P

It has more platters then a stack of pancakes :D

I'm not phased at all, I've got TONS of those in my Cisco classroom :p

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Originally posted by meat322
i may be wrong but i think its a dmf hd its been a while. if you take it apart there will be a mean stack of platters in there:eek:

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you are very right. for some reason in one of the computer labs there are several of them lined up and they are all dissasembeled and they have 10-12 platters. it just goes to show how far technology has come in a short time

That thing is really old! To the you the truth, I have never seen a hard drive that old before. I think the oldest hard drive I've seen was an old 250MB hard drive. :eek:

Like Colossus said, it's an old 5.25" full-height MFM or RLL drive. You'd need the approprate controller (8-bit ISA) and the two ribbon cables to go from the controller to the drive.

But even if you had a controller, you wouldn't be able to find out what's on the drive unless you had the original controller. With MFM or RLL drives, if you move the drive to a different controller, you just lost your data. The low-level drive controller circuitry is actually on the ISA card, not on the drive itself. (That's why IDE drives were called Integrated Drive Electronics -- they moved the controller circuitry from the controller card to the drive's circuit board.)

I actually still have a working full-height 5.25" drive, but it's a 10 GB SCSI drive. It's a relic now, but cost an absolute fortune when it was new.

{EDIT} By the way... that "4 GB" drive in your picture is actually 1.6 GB. ;)

Thanks SkyDog,

I still have my old 20MB HD with my XT.. Boy was that an expensive upgrade. Its a MFM drive too :) Its rare to come across RLL, since it was not used as much as MFM...

I didnt know that the drive is tied to the controller in that way.. Its amazing what one will learn each and every day :)

Oldest thing I have is an AT power supply.:( Wish I had something cool to show off like that.

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But even if you had a controller, you wouldn't be able to find out what's on the drive unless you had the original controller. With MFM or RLL drives, if you move the drive to a different controller, you just lost your data. The low-level drive controller circuitry is actually on the ISA card, not on the drive itself. (That's why IDE drives were called Integrated Drive Electronics -- they moved the controller circuitry from the controller card to the drive's circuit board.)

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But he could still use the drive right? He just won't be able to view the contents becuase it will have been formatted?

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Originally posted by SkyDog
{EDIT} By the way... that "4 GB" drive in your picture is actually 1.6 GB. ;)

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lol, oops :D . I had a 4 gig and a 1.6 gig hard drive sitting next to each other and I grabbed the wrong one before I took the picture!
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I still don't see why I wouldn't be able to read the data. It's stored magnetically on the actual hard drive, not on the controller, right?

wouldn't I just have to find a MFM controller? If I do, can I use any MFM controller? or does it have to be specifically for that hard drive?

Would this one work?

edit:
lol just remembered another thing. Those controllers are for ISA slots, right? If they are, I'd have to dig up my old computer from the basement unless there's some sort of PCI to ISA converter slot thingy I could buy somewhere.


edit again:
I just found some technical info on the drive. It turns out the ST-4096 means something else and the drive actually has 80.2 MB capacity. A lot more than I expected. It transfers a whopping 5 mbits / second too. and it can suck up to 55 watts of power :)

Yes, I was just going to point out the capacity.

I'm actually quite surprised how big (capacity wise and other wise) that thing is. I'm glad I don't have one of those in my computer...

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Originally posted by Colossus


BTW: Its MFM or RLL :)

From the pics I would say its a MFM drive :)

You need a proprietary controller to run it. And your floppy drive might be faster then that drive :P

It has more platters then a stack of pancakes :D

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yea mfm thats it! that was too many beers ago to remember what it was called;)

Hey I've got a stack of drives that look like that. Along with a few of the first-generation IDE drives (about 25 MB w/a 40 pin connector, but look very similar).

If you could get this one running, I'd offer to send you all mine if it didn't cost an arm & a leg to ship them. Those things are heavy!

OMG, that 80MB MFM hard drive is from the bad ol' days of 386-class computers. And the version of MS-DOS that was current at the time of that HD - MS-DOS 3.3 - doesn't support partitions larger than 32MB. You would need at least three partitions on that 80MB hard drive if you were using DOS 3.3.