hard drives What is the oldest hard drive you own?

[+hedleigh Subscriber²]

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:

[tsupersonic]

Dead: Maxtor 2.5GB drive, from our first computer in 1996

Working: Western Digital 8GB drive, from 1998

From my experience, Western Digital drives last a very long time.

[Kami-]

20MB drive from an old IBM 286 :) - it may or may not be functioning, too lazy to try it.

[KingCracker]

I have an external hard drive from 06 that survived hell and back and still works. Survived a 2000+ mile trip across the U.S in cold,wet and icy conditions in the back of my pickup truck.

[kdw1975]

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.

[The King of GnG]

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....

[Roger H. Veteran]

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!

[AJerman]

I've got a Macintosh Plus with a huge 20 MB external drive laying around somewhere.

[hjf288]

44MB Seagate... Still works from around 1993/1994

[qdave]

How about some tapes? :D

Anyway the oldest hdd i have is 2.7gb hdd from 1997 or so. Windows 95 on it..and still works!

[Nothing Here]

I also have an old Maxtor 300mb same as Ice_Blues. I Also have an old Quantum Bigfoot 40gig (I think WD bought them out) with Win2k on it.

[+jamesyfx Subscriber²]

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

[thealexweb]

I took some old tech to be recycled the other day, amongst them was an 8GB HDD from IBM.

[+Anarkii Subscriber²]

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?

[PNWDweller]

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).

[Hum]

I think Tom Edison built this one drive for the Atari. :laugh:

[GuJu]

oldest harddrive I have is from a Sony CPU 40 GB from 2002~

[Symal Taneous]

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.

[IrfanL]

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.

[myxomatosis]

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

[n_K]

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.

[ndoggfromhell]

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.

[yeoo_andy_ni]

My oldest is a 6GB Maxtor drive. Got it when I got my new computer for turning 18 in October 1998. 6GB back then was a monster of a drive!

[cooky560 Veteran]

2GB 1998 HD, no idea if it still works

[Authentic X]

I have a 41mb hard drive from the early 1990's,probably still works,and it might hold 5 whole mp3's lol