I recently acquired a 5.12" 2GB HD (about the footprint of a CD Rom Drive) I know that this is old stuff, but do they still make drives that big anymore? I remember having a 3.5" 4x height HD that only held 120MB that was in a 286. The thing took 2 HD Bays I believe. Tell me if any of you have encountered a "BIG" drive. And i dont mean Laser Discs...
Anonymous
User login
Please support the defense of Ukraine.
Direct or via Unclutter App
Active forum topics
Recent content
Navigation
No Ads.
No Trackers.
No Social Media.
All Content Locally Hosted.
Built on Free Software.
We have complied with zero government requests for information.
my brother once told me, while hes was dumpster diving, he found a 12" floppy drive with floppies. It hooked up to and IBM XT. The XT told us the disk had 3MB's of space. It was full of encrypted data, so we were not able to look through it.
I'm guessing these were used for "Serious" storage. This was at First Data Resources in Omaha. When i went in there when i was about 5, There were machines spooling tape the size of a 19" monitor. These all were to process credit card orders.
Although they're not as old as those, the Quantum Bigfoot drives were big and downright dorky looking.
I am a person who likes to visit technology timelines that are as old (or older) as me. My dream (which i know is impossible) is to own a UniVAC. Also a Cray1. The Cray's are awesome. the thing only worked at 80MHz, but with 1063 processors running at that speed, and the mile-wide bus (which I think was measured as "how many wires" there are) this was a great machine. So, i am going to enjoy this HD. It is kinda fun to find outdated things and make new uses with them
I used to boast about my Quantum Bigfoot drive
I've got a number of 'em, both in service and out. My server currently has 6 Seagate Elite fullsize drives, 3 x 23GB and 3 x 47GB. The Elite series are terrific drives, built for years of 24/7 usage, and were priced accordingly when new. I've also got a bunch of other drives laying about, from 700MB on up, most are dead. I keep 'em around, kids love taking them apart. The platters are huge and shiny . . .
FYI, full height is 3.25" high, half height is 1.6" and one third height is 1". Opticals are half height, as are a number of server-type 3.5" hard drives. Modern desktop drives are 1/3 height usually.
Another tidbit - the only Macs which can accept full-sized drives internally (without any mods) are the Q900/950, and the 8600/9600 boxen. I suppose the G3 tower might be able as well, though I've not had one so I don't really know. Long ago I installed a huge 2GB monster inside a PPC Q950, had to fab the bracket though IIRC . . .
dan k
How about loud drives. I had a Seagate Barracuda drive.. well still do. You power the thing up and the drive sounds like a jet engine starting up.
You think that's loud? 'Cudas are nothing compared to powering up the old 5.25" full height 300MB SCSIs of the old days. Those were the kind of drives that took about 20 secs to get spun up to speed, seek and verify the media, and report to the SCSI bus. Those were the kind of drives that they made the timeout options available for on many SCSI controllers. One of those roars louder than many multi-fanned and multi-drive loud P4 monsters of today. Just ask ax0n, I gave him one once to put in his old IBM PS/2 Model 80 tower. Loud beast.
I could always break out the old XT w/ the 10MB MF drive in it. Or the Compaq Portable II that I've got w/ one of the original 20 or 30MB IDE drives. I forget if my IBM PC Portable has a HDD, but I'm sure the Broadax BPX-1 Portable has one, but I dunno how big it is off hand.
It's a good thing you don't any more. Those drives were the absolute worst. Every time I ran across one, it always had some form of sector damage.
Several years ago I worked at a computer store, and we once found a gigantic 1GB SCSI Seagate drive. The thing was bigger than full-height -- it had to be at least 8 inches tall, and weighed about 40 pounds. We used it as a (very effective) doorstop.
On Monday, I salvaged (among other things) a full-height Seagate 2.9 GB drive, and a 4 GB Barracuda.
While the full-height is a bid louder than the average modern drive, but the sound is all lower in pitch. It's definitely quieter than the half-height Barracuda, which had a terrible whine.
Another foundling was a 4 GB scsi Quantum Viking which is very quiet...until the heads move, and it sounds like there are little elves inside the drive that position the heads by hitting them with little metal mallets.
I've had a 1 GB full-height Seagate for years now, and still use it on occasion. It's been treated poorly, most of the time bumping around bare on a shelf, but it still spins up like a sleepy 747 engine.
I had two of them, both developed bad sectors within a year.
Paid $500 AU for two 1 Gig Seagate full height full width drives in a 4U industrial rack with power supply and some kind of heater element to keep them warm (huh?). Seemed like a bargain at the time. For a while I had them mounted in an ATX case with the SCSI cable connected to the back of my 6100. The ATX was also functioning as a PC with its own drives, which led to all sorts of hilarity when one of the company directors decided to "liquidate" (ie steal) some hardware.
Noisy? Like a shop vac on steroids.
My biggest and loudest drive was a Priam 160megabyte drive that i got around 1989-1990 or so. Got it at a computer show, this was in the days before IDE really started taking off and scsi was prohibitly expensive. It was a MFM drive however the guy I bought it from had installed Disk Manager onto the first partition (32 meg) and then Disk Manager overlayed the rest of the drive with custom parameters which included tricking the drive into RLL encoding instead of MFM for the other 2 or 3 partitons. That garnered me a grand total of like 260 megabytes (i beleive RLL to MFM was about a 1.5 to 1 ratio).
The thing was a full height 5 1/4 inch drive and had the 2 cables out the back plus the power cable (2 ribbon and 1 power). I had it in my case (at style desktop) but it was so hot, it started flaking out). I then put it on top of the comptuer and it stayed cool enough. Loud as heck, (louder than any of my old 7200 rpm scsi drives.) The thing just was flaky also.
My first large SCSI drive was a refurbished Micropolis 9GB drive. Of course it expired the day after the warranty expired.
I was also given not too long ago a 300MB Digital SCSI drive in a very hefty case. I should have kept the case, but didn't have the room. You could have put a full mini-itx system in that case.
I currently have a few Quantum Bigfoot drives (2GB, 6GB). They work, but are slightly noisy.
Did you know that they made 12GB Bigfoots? I had one once upon a time.
I've got a 12GB BigFoot. It's probably stuck in that old Compaq Presario 4910, or in one of the AMD K6-2 boxen around somewhere. Turns out that Compaq designed the first K6 boxen of theirs to use the BigFoot drives. The main HDD is in a 5.25" internal bay. THe original was a 2-6GB BigFoot that was dying.
I've got an old Sun (a-la Sun 2 period) drive enclosure. It's SCSI, but with a SCSI to ESDI interface and a 345MB ESDI drive inside, w/ room for one more. It's huge. Dual full-size 5.25" drives, the old P/S in a tough steel case. Ouch for the foot it falls on!