EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Computers => Vintage Computing => Topic started by: Halcyon on December 20, 2017, 10:20:02 pm
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The top cover has been removed and there are no identifying brands or markings apart from a serial number. The platters are approx. 20cm in diameter.
EDIT: Removing the metal cover reveals some ICs but none appear to have date codes.
EDIT #2: I'm just wondering if the SS9130 and QFVD9146 markings are date codes? Late 1991 perhaps?
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It could be anything. An indication as to what sort of interface it uses may help. With 20cm platters, I don't imagine that thing fitting into a PC-compatible any time soon, and before then hard drives were mostly server, mainframe, or mini's domain.
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It's definitely not a PC hard disk, it's from a mainframe or server of some sort. Probably from the 1980's if I had to guess.
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In the 1980's we used 14 inch drives in our DEC VAX cluster. Each 14 inch drive had a capacity of about 450MB. This gives an indication on the capacity of this 8 inch drive ...
If you had money, very much of it, you could buy an IBIS 1400. A disk with a weird vertical 14 inch drive with a capacity of 1.4GB. Cray used these drives with their supercomputers.
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It's definitely not a PC hard disk, it's from a mainframe or server of some sort. Probably from the 1980's if I had to guess.
The date code on the MECL chips shows 1991. Could be a CDC, IBM or DEC drive. Ought to be a logo on something to tell for sure.
I did see a hint of a bar code on the edge of the platters.
Jon
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The date code on the MECL chips shows 1991. Could be a CDC, IBM or DEC drive. Ought to be a logo on something to tell for sure.
I did see a hint of a bar code on the edge of the platters.
Yep, it looks like the edge of each platter is encoded with a barcode however they are too narrow for my camera's auto focus to lock onto. No logos at all, I suspect there would have been on the top cover, but that is long gone.
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I think the 32R252R's ic's from Silicon Systems date to around 1993. Does it have an IDE (40 pin) connector or a SCSI connector?
If it was IDE, the drive has a maximum capacity of just over 500MBytes and could easily be a lot less. That was as big as IDE could handle back then. If it is SCSI, there were a few brands that went up to about 2GBytes which was massive at the time.
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I found out what it was (actually found the other half of the case). It's a Seagate 2GB "Sabre Module Assembly" ML202948 (Assy # 70896783). It looks like it had a SCSI interface but it has been removed. It seems to be part of a bigger system.