General > General Technical Chat
Hard Disk Storage 1985
RobK_NL:
Probably lighter too; over 20kg IIRC. We also did the 3380, which were even larger and heavier.
GeorgeOfTheJungle:
I'd love to have one of those.
RobK_NL:
Only have two platters and a head assembly, sorry :)
rrinker:
And that's just the drive, you should see the motor that spins it!
One of the places I worked had a huge IBM 390 (and clone) data center, 13TB of DASD took up one huge room, the processors were in another. I have more than 13TB in my mini-tower server at home.
duak:
I got a 15 Mb Honeywell hard drive with a pack in 1978. It used late 60's technology and was about the size of a washing machine. The controller/formatter was apparently about the size of a fridge. I was able to spin up the drive and load the heads and see some data with a 'scope. The head actuator was hydraulic and was driven off the spindle by a big flat belt and was about as loud as a Shop-vac. I later worked with an ex-DEC guy that said that the flat belt often fell off when it collected enough oil. If it was writing at the time it would first overwrite the data with longer bits and then grind off the oxide as the heads moved away from that cylinder and stopped flying.
I saved the frame for a work table and used the motor for a grinder. I'm thinking of using the spindle for something like a surface grinder. I took the pack apart and found two roached platters where the heads crashed.
In late 1980 I got one of the first Shugart (not Seagate) 8" hard disks with, count 'em, 4 Mb. With the SASI (precursor to SCSI) controller it came to about $2K. I was playing with assemblers and a C complier at the time and it reduced run times by about 60-80% over dual 8" floppies. I last ran it about 10 years later and it still worked. It was a hoot to boot into CP/M in less than a second. I still have it and one of these days I might try it again. Any comments on whether the heads might peel the oxide off the platter because it hasn't been used for so long? It didn't have a dedicated landing zone but I always tried to set it over the innermost cylinder when shutting it off.
I'd say that by 1985 small disks were commodities and the price per bit really started to drop. Weren't there like over 20 manufacturers of small disk drives about then?
Cheers,
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