The old hard drive sound!

[jasonl]

Remember the old MFM and RLL drives?
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Love that CLUNK at startup and shutdown. Probably a solenoid that keeps the head parked.

 

[westytoploader]

Very cool! LOVE those full-height drives! I don't remember the half-height Seagate ST-225s ever clunking; they did make a cool grinding noise when parking/unparking the heads.

It's hard to tell what the drive in the video actually is as they all seemed to look the same from that time! Some of the comments say it's an 80 MB ST-506, but it also looks like an old 120 MB Maxtor drive I had, minus the bus at the top of course.

 

[DADoES]

I have an RLL hard drive in my junk closet. I have a couple 5.25" full-height 9 GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI drives that make a charming whining sound when powering-up. One of them is in the theater's computer that has been running 24/7 for close to 8 years.

 

[retroguy]

Wow...

I was ready for that thing to taxi down the runway and take off!

 

[cleanteamofny]

Is the spin cycle over?
I think the bearings are long gone.........

 

[jasonl]

The bearings are just fine in that unit. It's supposed to sound like that. Quiet computing wasn't an option back then.

 

[westytoploader]

Finally found it!

Even though they're not switched on, unfortunately, you'll see a couple of classic Seagate drives here, including the smaller, faster, more "whiny" ST-157A that I mentioned before (though the model number I mentioned was WAY off!). In the shot of the two drives stacked on top of each other, it's the one on the bottom. Those are easy to spot because they have a vertical receptacle for the power supply cable, not horizontal like most. Some fit into a special "carriage" so that they could be adapted to a 5.25" half-height drive bay, while others were mounted inside the PC, using a separate LED disk access light.

 

[cleanteamofny]

Jason,

how old is that HD?

 

[jasonl]

Cleanteam

Those full-height ones like in the video are from the 80s-early 90s. When I got my first job fixing PC's the 3.5" IDE's just came out but there were plenty of those 5.25" drives hanging around.