Inside a stepper motor hard drive: startup test

[ENGINEBLOWUK]

got 2 old esdi drives

[manoftnuva]

Looks like a sticky man typing something on disk =)

[marksmall82]

I have one of those type of drives! 5mb, dc motor, belt drive, stepper motor controlled head. worked perfectly until i tried storeing too much data on it and the head hit the rusty pach on the disk... :-)

[SpellboundSolution]

It's truly dead now? If not, a video would be interesting.

[the731272]

@marksmall82 hi there aluminum doesn't rust :P but it does corrode but that takes like 80 years so if you're disk was invented in the 60's the "rust" does not exist and in a sealed case it won't corrode. :P again

[coilsinamotor]

is that one of the older ones cuse mine has a electo magnet insted

[SpellboundSolution]

All drives for the last 1.5 decades have used voice coils. This is a prehistoric hard drive.

[coilsinamotor]

lol

[SpellboundSolution]

Thats what they looked like before voice coils. I've uploaded a similar video in HD now.

[weeardguy]

@SpellboundSolution My brother and me once opened a drive that a fully 'horizontal' head-assembly: the head was pointing to the center of the disk, and got moved by a worm-wheel and motor with pin-wheel... too bad I didn't keep it... was probably an idiotic low storage-capacity to now-adays standards.

[Petchhyy]

These things had like 140ms seek times.

Crazy.

[lee4hmz]

@Petchhyy This one was actually somewhat better than that, clocking in at around 28 ms average seek (the same as a Zip drive). Seagate was able to pull that off by using a custom 5-phase stepper motor (which they'd originally developed for the ST-251 in 1988) and some other tricks.

[lee4hmz]

That's a Seagate ST351A/X, a weird little drive that was also the last stepper-motor model Seagate made. It's only a 40MB drive.

[Sauber9]

Only 40MB? We can't install anything on it, nowadays...

[oc5nsli341nforce4]

I got a working 170mb connor drive and no problems even used it until 2006 I had the money for thumb drives to shuffle files between computers.

[bluebutdude1]

whats a nokia 6600?

[Duxasblt]

its a phone used by girls for insertation... rofl

[scott93257]

LMFAO

[joeruckasnucka]

@bluebutdude1 cell phone, or as us brits call them: mobile phone ;)

[Messerschmitt262a2a]

could you make a video from it with start and shutdown?

[VideyoJunkei]

besides using rack and pinion, like here, some older HD and floppy drives used a metal band going around the stepper motor shaft. I think most 5 1/4" floppies were like that.

[DURAMATRIX112]

wow that look weird.

[bradman5505]

i know right

[Messerschmitt262a2a]

does this thing work or is it damaged because opening

[SpellboundSolution]

I don't know for sure because I don't have a driver card for the drive interface used. It's a very old disk and has a redundant interface.

[Messerschmitt262a2a]

what model is it?

[SpellboundSolution]

It's been a long time since I took that video, I don't know what the model is. If you search eBay for stepper motor hard drive (recommend using title and description search) or just search for hard drive under vintage computing you should find an equivalent drive.

[scottieneon]

What make and model is that drive?

[DURAMATRIX112]

its a 1989 seagate im not sure about the model

[sweanon]

odd actuator.

[tombell12]

Never seen a hard drive with a motor like that before! :O

[SpellboundSolution]

This is a very old drive which uses a stepper motor combined with a rack and pinion to move the arm. Voice coils and on-disc servo tracks are used today (and have been for more than a decade)

[tombell12]

Ahhh. How old are we talking here? How many MB's does it hold?

[SpellboundSolution]

180MB if I remember correctly.