Extremely Old 4 Megabyte HD. How to hook up?

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Originally posted by IntelSux
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.

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My parents had probably the same 20 mB hd as Colossus on their PC. It was on its own isa card. I always thought the first pc hard drive was 10mB - if that really is 4, its not for a pc. Is there a DATE anywhere on it?

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Originally posted by russ_watters
I always thought the first pc hard drive was 10mB - if that really is 4, its not for a pc. Is there a DATE anywhere on it?

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I've seen 5 MB MFM & RLL hard drives in 8088 & 286 machines -- like the Seagate ST406 & ST506.

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Originally posted by IntelSux
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?

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It depends on how good your data recovery equipment is. ;) The data is stored on the drive, but drive geometry information is stored on the controller. All of the cylinder/head/sector info, bad sector info, track alignment info, etc. is stored on the controller instead of the drive in an MFM or RLL setup. If you replace the controller, you would need to do a low-level reformat on the drive to repopulate that info in the controller.

it would be nice to see what is on this old drive.

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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

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55 watts, huh? What do modern day hdds take?

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Originally posted by fbs1992

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

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I would take one that size today. Give it a 80GB per platter density and you have near 1TB :D ALthough I bet the chances of failure with todays rotational speed would be very high.

Eric

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Originally posted by speedstream5621

55 watts, huh? What do modern day hdds take?

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I looked at Seagate's web site, since they're pretty good about making drive specs easy to find:

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ST3120023A
(120 GB Barracuda V ATA-100)

POWER MANAGEMENT (Watts):
        ACTIVE:              13.0
        IDLE:                7.5
        STANDBY (typ/max):  0.7/

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I'm still taken aback by how large the drive is.

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Originally posted by Sandro
I'm still taken aback by how large the drive is.

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You'd be even more taken aback if you felt how heavy those old beasts can be!

The largest drive I've personally seen was part of an old Navy helicopter flight simulator. The drive had removable platters so you could swap media, but the platters had to be removed by forklift!