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Man We've come a long way!

For magnetic media we really haven't come along way as most of the theories and working are the same or similar. But this was an interesting video nonetheless.
 
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An Old Fart Remembers....

Note: Vintage computer information follows.

An interesting note about hard drive technology is although it was developed (by IBM) initially about 60 years ago the technology has never been perfected. You can get online and read reviews of drives from Amazon, Newegg or anywhere else and see people saying "I bought 12 of these drives for my NAS, 3 were DOA, and 3 others died in the first month". This is very true because I just went through the same issue trying to find 8 functioning 3TB WD Reds for my new Synology NAS.

The technology has made tremendous strides but has never been perfected. I believe Hard Drives, or Winchester Drives as we used to call them will be obsolete before they are ever perfected.

My first hard drive was very early 1980s, it was 10 megabytes and cost me $1200.00. If that wasn't bad enough, it crashed hard about every 2 months requiring me to send it in to the distributor 5 or 6 times in the first year. Of course right at my one year my warranty it failed again and went in the trash (with quite a few tears). It wasn't a lemon, that was the state of the technology at the time. That hard drive was the 5.25 form factor. Hard drive sizes pretty much paralleled floppy disk sizes. Well, really vise versa. That drive in the video had 10.5 dia platters or double the size of the 5.25 (black) floppy or hard drives.

I don't know why they abandoned the 5.25 form factor for hard drives but kept it for optical drives. If they made a modern 5.25 hard drive you could slip it in your optical bay and it would probably hold +10 TB. Go figure.

Another note on form factor that really bugs me. I see many "Experts" on you tube videos stating the 5.25, 3.5 or 2.5 form factor refers to the width of the drive. WRONG. It refers to the diameters of the platters inside the case, same goes for floppies.

On a final note. Hard drives of the time did not auto-park the heads on power down like they do today. Hard drives park their heads by moving them to the very inside of the platters , off the area that contains data, because when the platters stop spinning the heads actually come into contact with the platters. If there is data under the head when it comes into contact with the platter it's referred to as a head crash. (a very bad thing) This can still happen today if a drive if bumped hard enough during operation. During normal operation the heads float on a cushion of air, 1 molecule thick, above the platters. Before turning off the power to your winchester drive you had to issue a "Park Head" command from command line (Apple DOS 3.3 for me) yes, Apples ran on DOS, Apple Disk Operating System. If you forgot to park your heads you stood a very real chance of a "Head Crash" which could at best wipe out your data and at worst destroy your drive.

MacRumors Old Fart....
 
Dr. Stealth said:
Hard drives park their heads by moving them to the very inside of the platters , off the area that contains data, because when the platters stop spinning the heads actually come into contact with the platters. If there is data under the head when it comes into contact with the platter it's referred to as a head crash.
Click to expand...

I dont think it matters if there is data on the platter under the head when it contacts the platter, either way it is considered a head crash.
 
brand said:
I dont think it matters if there is data on the platter under the head when it contacts the platter, either way it is considered a head crash.
Click to expand...

Not so. The only thing that keeps the heads off the platter is the shape of the head and the spinning of the platter. Like a hydrofoil boat skating over water. When the platters stop, on power down, the heads rest on the platters. Either safely off the data area in the park zone (a normal park) or on the data area (head crash).

Read up on Winchester Drives....
 
Dr. Stealth said:
Not so. The only thing that keeps the heads off the platter is the shape of the head and the spinning of the platter. Like a hydrofoil boat skating over water. When the platters stop, on power down, the heads rest on the platters. Either safely off the data area in the park zone (a normal park) or on the data area (head crash).
Click to expand...

You originally didn't say "data area" you said "If there is data under the head when it comes into contact with the platter", technically the head could still crash into the data area without there being data under the head when it comes into contact with the platter.

The point I was making was that if the head touches the data portion of the platter when it is considered a head crash even if data is not present at the time.
 
Dr. Stealth said:
An interesting note about hard drive technology is although it was developed (by IBM) initially about 60 years ago the technology has never been perfected.
Click to expand...

What struck me most while watching was not the size (which is dramatic) but the build quality. Every minute detail was agonized over, from the shape of the pan to the length if each wire. Then as he's talking about the design being from the 70s, it becomes clear that this 10 MB example was built in 1991. I owned a 40 MB drive in 1987. There's only one reason to keep making this monster when smaller/cheaper examples already existed, durability.

The reason drives failed then is the same reason they fail now, customers care more about capacity. 20 years ago, someone paid 200 times as much for a drive that lasted 20 times as long. They could do even better with drives today, but no one is willing to pay for such a thing. It would be obsolete long before that happened.


Dr. Stealth said:
I don't know why they abandoned the 5.25 form factor for hard drives but kept it for optical drives. If they made a modern 5.25 hard drive you could slip it in your optical bay and it would probably hold +10 TB. Go figure.
Click to expand...

Great point.
 
Incredibly annoying guy, watched maybe a minute or so but that was more than enough.
 
My first HDD, sometime back in the 80s was a Conner 100MB HDD, I thought I had the world in that 5.25" storage box. No more floppy flipping, I could power up and do all my work and then store it on the same medium. And, boy was it fast:eek: The interface was SCSI and I used it on my Mac Plus and later my SE/30. I paid $800.00 for that Conner.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
No more floppy flipping, I could power up and do all my work and then store it on the same medium.
Click to expand...

At least until it was time to back up. Nothing like the work of offloading all that data, even with automated software. And then half way through the verification of 25 odd disks, it kicks out an error and you have to start all over.


costabunny said:
I thought that at first, but you start to dig him.
Click to expand...

It's aussie style, which is love it or hate it. I for one love it.
 
Dr. Stealth said:
You can get online and read reviews of drives from Amazon, Newegg or anywhere else and see people saying "I bought 12 of these drives for my NAS, 3 were DOA, and 3 others died in the first month". This is very true because I just went through the same issue trying to find 8 functioning 3TB WD Reds for my new Synology NAS.
Click to expand...

Seems like the DOA problem could be fixed if the mfr could be bothered to test them at the factory instead of leaving it up to the end user.

I've supported hundreds of hard drives. We lost one every three months or so. People don't understand how common it is and how important backup is.
 
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