Extremely Old 4 Megabyte HD. How to hook up?

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04-15-2003, 08:04 PM
IntelSux

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
04-15-2003, 08:29 PM
bluesfusion

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./
04-15-2003, 08:45 PM
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:
04-15-2003, 09:27 PM
Colossus

Quote:

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:

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
04-15-2003, 09:45 PM
Ashpool

I'm not phased at all, I've got TONS of those in my Cisco classroom :p
04-15-2003, 09:47 PM
fbs1992

Quote:

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:

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
04-15-2003, 10:06 PM
gateways_rule

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:
04-15-2003, 10:21 PM
SkyDog

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. ;)
04-15-2003, 10:25 PM
Colossus

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 :)
04-15-2003, 11:51 PM
speedstream5621

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

Quote:

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.)

But he could still use the drive right? He just won't be able to view the contents becuase it will have been formatted?
04-16-2003, 12:53 AM
IntelSux

Quote:

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

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!
---

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 :)
04-16-2003, 01:43 AM
Russell

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...
04-16-2003, 07:44 AM
meat322

Quote:

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

yea mfm thats it! that was too many beers ago to remember what it was called;)
04-16-2003, 09:23 AM
rock

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!
04-16-2003, 09:50 AM
Nasty

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.
04-16-2003, 11:05 AM
russ_watters

Re: Extremely Old 4 Megabyte HD. How to hook up?

Quote:

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.

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?
04-16-2003, 12:02 PM
SkyDog

Re: Re: Extremely Old 4 Megabyte HD. How to hook up?

Quote:

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?

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

Quote:

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?

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.
04-16-2003, 05:25 PM
richardginn

it would be nice to see what is on this old drive.
04-17-2003, 01:41 AM
speedstream5621

Quote:

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

55 watts, huh? What do modern day hdds take?
04-17-2003, 08:44 AM
ewitte

Quote:

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

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
04-17-2003, 09:02 AM
SkyDog

Quote:

Originally posted by speedstream5621

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

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

Code:

ST3120023A (120 GB Barracuda V ATA-100) POWER MANAGEMENT (Watts): ACTIVE: 13.0 IDLE: 7.5 STANDBY (typ/max): 0.7/
04-17-2003, 10:12 AM
Sandro

I'm still taken aback by how large the drive is.
04-17-2003, 10:28 AM
SkyDog

Quote:

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

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!