What is the oldest hard drive you own?

By Ice_Blue
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Grand Master

+hedleigh Subscriber²

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Oldest drive I can put my hands on readily is an old 40 mb fujitsu drive from my old Amiga 2000 or 3000. Paid a small fortune for it at the time. Didn't cost as much as my first 1/2 meg ram expansion though, $567 au. Oh the memories, oh the pain. :laugh:

Neowinian

kdw1975

Posted
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We have lots of old 1980s hard drives, but only two that are still in use. Our small businesses internal database software is run on a 1990 Dell 386. It has a 300 Meg. EIDE drive in it that is still used daily. So far it has been bulletproof.

We also have a Tandy 1000TX with a 40 Meg. drive that we bought new in 1987. It isn't used very often though.

We keep all of our old computers. The oldest one we have is my father's Tandy Model 1 from back in the late 70s. I remember he used it for payroll records and it had an external cassette tape drive that was kind of a pain to get working properly.

Rising Star

The King of GnG

Posted
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Let's see... there should be a 50 Megabytes HDD somewhere in my parent's garage extracted from my first PC from the first Nineties (an 80286@16 MHz, VGA Graphics and NO ****ING SOUND CARD!). The last time I tried to attach it to a Pentium 4 ATA-133 controller (some years ago) it was still working, and I expect it to work again when I'll finally decide to restore the 286 to its 16-bits glory....

Grand Master

Roger H. Veteran

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Just killed a 40GB IDE Maxtor that u had around. Used it as a weight to hold some stuff I was cleaning in bleech water. Lol

I wanted to strip it apart though for the magnet but got lazy. Those magnets are seriously strong too!

Grand Master

+jamesyfx Subscriber²

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The oldest hard drive I have is technically the one in my Xbox 360. I tend to renew my computers frequently, but that thing has stood strong for ages.

And yeah the magnets from hard drives are really useful. I used to use them to hang tools up when I was in a workshop. It was a double whammy - kept the bit magnetised and it kept them handy. xD

Grand Master

+Anarkii Subscriber²

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An Amiga 500's original 40mb Hard Drive :D

(Yes that says MegaByte) Circa 1989 I think dad brought it. Infact, it's still sitting in the lounge room collecting dust :)

I wonder how much Amiga 500's go for these days when it's still in good condition? Anyone got a clue?

Grand Master

PNWDweller

Posted
Posted

Now those that have the MFM's you really brought back some memories. I remember my parents having for a short time old IBM 8086 with Orange Screen running on floppies. Then, I remember them borrowing a MFM 10MB hard drive, which filled TWO 5.25" bays. It was quite heavy and loud too, but they used it for something I can't remember quite what though. That was back in 1990ish. Fast foward a couple of years later, and I got a 20GB MFM this time, smaller form factor and used it on my Atari 800XL w/blackbox extender (FRIGGIN AWESOME!), until I got rid of it.

If anyone ever gets the urge to do this with their old hard drives, pull the platters out, (The older the drive the better since they have more platters) and drill a hole into each one near the edge, tie some fishing line or thin wire to them and make a windchime. You can get some nice higher tones with the smaller drives 3.5" or smaller, and nice deep tones with the older drives, 5.25" platters. I did that a couple of times, but never seemed to keep them for some reason. I know a guy though who has at least 1 or 2 from then mid 90's still chiming away. :)

As for my hard drive collection, in storage, probably have about two 20gb IDE's, one 4.3gb, and at home, two laptop IDE drives both 80gb, and then one Seagate 1TB drive hooked up externally. About ready to die after about a year of constant power. (My enclosure doesn't do power saver modes, besides, the Mac thinks it is ejected unsafely when the drives go into power saver mode).

Rising Star

Symal Taneous

Posted
Posted

I have an old 40GB SATA HD that I pulled from my fat PS3 when I upgraded it to a 320GB. I still have my very first hard drive, it was a 3.2GB IDE hard drive from the first computer I ever owned back in 1999. I remember my cousin being jeallous of how much storage space I had, lol, his hard drive was only 1.7GB. My how times have changed, lol. I now have 6TB of storage space and I'm still running low on available space.

Experienced

IrfanL

Posted
Posted

I still have my dads Seagate 40MB HDD which at time used to have there on disk controller cards. My dad bought that for almost USD ~370/-. Not sure if its working. Because I opened it up for a paper I was writing back in college.

I have a Commodore, a working Atari, allot of floppy disks both 5" and 3.5". A working old cassette tape drive and allot of other small stuff.

From work I have got a old G1 HP server. But the problem is all the HDDs are dead.

Mentor

myxomatosis

Posted
Posted

I still have my old Packard Bell 286 (11MHz I think) somewhere in the basement ;) It had an incredibly speedy and massive 11Mb of storage ;) With DOS 5.0, XtreePro for file managing, etc.

My second oldest drive is a 250Mb drive I had in my old 486-DX 33MHz computer. I don't have the computer anymore, but I still have the HD, the Sound Blaster Pro and the memory modules (old SIMM, not even EDO). The CD-ROM drive was connected to the sound card ;) Good memories

Grand Master

n_K

Posted
Posted

Haha xtreepro, classic that!

1996 seagate 650MB or so H/D, not sure if it works or not.

Got 2 quantums from 1997/1998 that are 3GB and 5GB, one has jumpers next to the IDE port the other has them with tiny jumpers on the top of the board, one powers up fine the other powers up and sometimes works but at other times just keeps trying to get a grip in the spindle with the head but doesn't seem to manage it and powers down eventually randomly.

Proficient

ndoggfromhell

Posted
Posted

Every new computer I build for myself gets burned in with an ancient Seagate 130meg IDE Drive. It has Dos 6.22 on it and Windows 3.1 that usually needs a tweek to get working. Drive doesn't have SMART so no idea what the "power on minutes" are ... but they've got to be absurdly high by now. It was my main HD in my first 486 and up until my second K6-2 machine. It was also a slave drive after that in most pc's I built up until my AM2 build.

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