EEVblog #395 - World's Most Expensive Hard Drive Teardown

[EEVblog]

EEVblog #395 - World's Most Expensive Hard Drive Teardown

Dave.

[wastrix]

IBM 3390 series: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3390.html

Introduced 1989, probably 5-10GB.

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102649110

[David Aurora]

Probably my favourite teardown to date, awesome one mate!

Just emailed the link to my Dad, he was in the computer industry around the time this stuff was approaching end of life I think. I remember going to his office and seeing the rooms equipped with halon, data on tapes, hard drives measured in megabytes and considered huge... Crazy to think how far we've advanced so far in my lifetime.

[nitro2k01]

15:45 *Bangs head against monitor* That's an 8! (Isn't it?)

When you said it's the most expensive teardown to date, I immediately when to check what the Agilent 90000 cost. (Even though that wasn't really a teardown.) Nop, only $140,000.

That sticker, in the thermal chamber. Make it happen!

Here's a slightly less big hard drive that belongs to the student electronics club at uni.

[madworm]

Nice! Spin it up ;-)

Some more related photos. All of it was trashed many years ago. Too bulky, too heavy and of no real use anymore.

[notsob]

I used to repair disk drives in the 80's ( for a different manufacturer), both removable & fixed disk versions of approx 60+MByte, we repaired them to component level, the ones I worked on had individually replaceable heads, but no asics, all individual ICs. They had temp compensation built in and a full head alignment took some time.

Dave, you can get those stick on temp guages from the local home brew shop, they are put on plastic beer brewing containers to indicate the brew temperature whilst frementation is happening.

[wilfred]

Yes. It is a 3390 disk. IBM called it DASD for direct access storage device. The 3390 started out late 80's as a single density drive of a little less than 1 GB. In the next few years double triple and 9 times density units were introduced. That one was probably a triple density unit of about 2,8 GB. However what you have is actually a HDA (head disk assembly) that had two separately addressable drives sharing the one set of platters.

Each drive had 15 tracks (about 57 KB/track) per cylinder (vertical group of tracks accessable without moving the heads) with a 16th alternate track which could be assigned by the storage administrator in the event of errors in one of the 15 primary tracks. Some sites had policies to not do that and instead would copy the data to a spare and call in an engineer to replace the unit. If one track failed then the unit was probably due for more.

After these models IBM changed to racks of smaller disks that would be aggregated in arrays that used controller software to virtualise 3390 DASD and used larger caches to improve performance. The OS still thought it was addressing a 3390 DASD or strings of them but in reality it was just a bunch of cheaper hard disks. Changing the track size the OS sees is very rarely done.

At the end of each string of DASD would be a controller (or several) which received I/O channel programs from the CPU. In this way the CPU would offload the IO for improved performance.

Nice teardown Dave.

[Fliz]

Excellent, just excellent, I really enjoy every minute of this teardown 
I wish I had one of those plates  perfect material for wall LED clock
with tiny smd led's, no spinning parts... blend of old and new technology

Thanks Dave

[ElectronicTonic]

Dave! How can you not take apart the linear actuator? I've been tearing down hard drives since I was a kid, and any old drive that uses a moving coil (some had stepper motors) for the linear actuator is gonna have some bad ass super strong neodymium magnets. I've taken apart some smaller hard drives in the past (mid 80's vintage with ten 5.25 inch platters at 20 MB total) and they had much larger and much stronger magnets than the little rinkidink magnets in modern drives. Careful though. If you pinch your fingers with those huge magnets, the tear down gods will be quite pleased!

Also, it looks like that three terminal device inside the locking motor is a hall effect sensor. What is that little black colored block on the end of the semicircular toothed locking mechanism? A magnet? What causes the whole thing to move to become unlocked?

Anyway, awesome video, Dave! One of my favorites. I love tearing town hard drives, but I've never had such a ginormous one as this. Thanks for the porn!

[ElectronicTonic]

Also, what's with all those holes in the disk spacers? Is there some way for air (or halon) to flow into the center of the spindle and be propelled outward across the disks much like in a Tesla turbine?

[bitwelder]

Thanks Dave for the great teardown.
It was just pure p0rnography to watch the innards of such old engineering beauty!   

[SeanB]

I tore down a old hard drive that was a 2 platter 20M SCSI drive, that was used to run a mailing list ( moved now to a small file on a server) and which had a s100 bus Northstar Horizon and dumb terminals to operate it. Was a later version of CPM on 5 1/4" floppies which stored the program on disk and used the drive to store the database. Backup was on 2 boxes of 360k disks............

Still have the very heavy CVT that was used on the hard drive, the whole system used around 2kW.

[bxs]

Hi Dave,

That drive is too small, about 15 years ago I remember seeing one huge harddrive in a lab, I will try to contact a friend to see if it's still there (probably not...) and get some pictures

[Winston]

Dear Sir,

It has come to our attention that you are in possession of one of our Model 3390 397x hard disk
units that is still under a maintenance contract and which should have been returned to IBM upon
removal from user service.  Please return this unit to us in original, fully functional condition or
send us a check for US$250,000.

Best regards,
Winston Smith
President (imaginary)
IBM Service Department

[alanb]

I've seen larger units.

In the 80's I used a system with exchangable disk packs. The drive was about the size of a typical washing machine and each disk pack that was loaded on top was about 20 inches in diameter and 2 inches deep. The capacity of each disk was 10Mb.
I had a carrying case to hold one of the disks and had to take a disk off site every evening.

edit - It was a CDC Hawk and the capacity of the removable disk was 5MB there was a fixed disk of the same size internally.