Old Disc Drives | Introduction

Synopsis

General introductory information regarding the Old Disc Drives project.

Article

This site is the result of my hobby of collecting old hard disk drives. Most of the units that I collect and talk about are hardly ever seen in working machines these days. Some of them could still be found as collector items or forgotten in old computers lost in various basements.

The information within these pages is based only on my own remarks. By today's standards, it could well be considered obsolete. But back in the year 2000, when I started this site, I couldn't find very much about the drives I was already collecting. Technical literature existed, but I had no access to it. It was mostly in printed format or available on the proto Internet (remember BBS?). Or at least I didn't know how to find it. Or the search engines of that era were not capable of locating it. What little information I could find was not very accurate, and some sources were questionable. Sometimes I was lucky and found official datasheets.

Of course, my writings could contain mistakes. So please take everything I wrote as-is. And remember, this is not official information.

It is best that you treat this site as a historical time capsule. Starting with 2014, I have updated and corrected most of the content on these pages. I have also started adding fresh information about some new drives from my collection. As of 2020, I am still maintaining this site even though I kind of stopped collecting old drives. And for good reasons: I can't find any that are still working properly and don't cost an arm and a leg.

If you are wondering about the status of my hard disk drives collection, then it's good to know that I parted with most of them.
I still have a couple of Seagate ST-351A/X and a few Quantum Fireball units though.

The pictures on this site were taken with one or more of the following digital still cameras: Mercury SlimCam II, Sony DSC-S60, Canon A4000 IS, Olympus E-PL3, and Sony DSC-RX100. This is why quality varies a lot. Most of the pictures were taken more than 20 years ago. Sorry for the low picture quality. That is what I had available at the time.

Thank you for spending your time reading these old pages.