GCC HyperDrive 20 (in Mac 512k) Photos

[JDW]

My Hyperdrive 20 Mac 512k arrived a week ago, and I've taken the followig 9 photos:

GCC HyperDrive 20 Controller Piggyback on Logic Board

GCC HyperDrive 20 Controller and 68000 Attachment (one side)

GCC HyperDrive 20 Controller and 68000 Attachment (other side)

GCC HyperDrive 20 Suspension Shock Absorbers

GCC HyperDrive 20 PSU

GCC HyperDrive 20 EMI Filter Closeup

GCC HyperDrive 20 Installation

GCC HyperDrive 20 Multi-Speed Case Fan

GCC HyperDrive 20 68000 Clip

Each photo has a detailed description.

I also own another Mac 512k to which I have attached an Apple HD20 (serial interface) hard drive. I can attest to what you often read on the new about the Hyperdrive being faster. The HD20 feels faster than a floppy, of course, but the Hyperdrive feels like a SCSI drive was attached (or slightly faster). But this makes sense as it taps directly into the 68000 CPU whereas the HD20 uses relatively slow serial.

As noted in on of my photos, I found the most interesting part of the Hyperdrive hardware to be the 4-point suspension. I was very impressed by the amount of engineering that went into it. It truly is one of the most impressive internal hard drive implementations available for any Mac ever made.

[puckman]

Thanks for sharing, I think if ALL of us here on 68kmla get our cameras out and do some serious snapping we should be able to documents Apple's 68k product line in no time. I will start mine on monday (as I store my Mac's at work) Who is with me?

[Unknown_K]

I have a very small part of my collection online here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/teozenios

[JDW]

I appreciate the comments, especially the link. I see that Picasa allows a large photo size (1600px) than Flickr (1024px). I'm a resolution fanatic, so this appeals to me. I may need to transfer everything to Picasa at some point! But I still like many Flickr features, and the 68kMLA Flickr Group is nice too.

[puckman]

Since when does Flickr have a limit? I have uploaded photos of my Newton WAY bigger than that!

[LCGuy]

What interface is the drive? It looks like MFM or something.

[JDW]

Flickr says 1024 x 768, but in fact you can upload 1024 x 1024. The largest side is 1024 pixels, unless you pay Flickr your hard earned cash for higher resolution photo hosting. I personally do this for fun and as a hobby, and somewhat to benefit the classic Mac community as a whole. But I cannot afford to pay a monthly fee for higher resolution photos. That is why I mentioned Googles service in my post above, because they allow up to 1600 pixels (up from 1024 on Flickr) for FREE. But again, the communities and groups on Flickr are better than Picasa because Flickr has just become more popular over time. Ironically, I like searching on Flickr better than Google! You wouldn't expect that! But Google doesn't allow users to pick any search tags they want like Flickr. I go crazy with tags on my Flickr photos because I want any classic Mac enthusiast to be able to find my photos on a simple Flickr search.

I'm not an expert on hard drive interfaces, so you will have to explain MFM for me. I can only say it is not SCSI or IDE or any modern drive implementation. There are two ribbon cables (not shown in my photos) that attached the back of the drive (the side shown in the photo I took from the analog side of the Mac) and connect to the Hyperdrive controller card, which in turn connects to the 68000 on the Mac's logic board.

You can see from a couple of my photos the black plastic faceplate on the drive (with the LED). As I recall from years past, this was a common faceplate for hard disks in IBM PC's, so I guess that is what GCC used for their drive mechanism.

[coius]

that is pretty remarkable. MFM is an early way that drives communicated with the controller. I believe the controller was the thing that determined the drive's way on how to access the disks, not the drive board itself.
At college, when I was taking my hardware classes, they have a 14" platter drive there that used dual arm heads, and required dual MFM controllers. if you didn't, you only accessed half the drive. The controllers would communicate through a second bridgeboard, that would then plug into the early ISA slots on the old computers (XTs/PC Jrs.)

If you used a 20MB and lower drive, it didn't require the extra controller, but the second one was so that it could access every other platter (one drive accessed one platter, then next would access the next, and so on)

The hard drive was amazing! it has 5 platters and totalled 70MB!!! it was used in the server systems out at FDR (first data Resources, they work with credit card numbers and stuff)


Anyways, i LOVE old stuff. Was this kit made for the 512?

[tomlee59]

You can't tell MFM from RLL or any other kind of modulation/coding by looking -- the particular modulation method is decoupled from the interface. For example, many SCSI drives used MFM, as did many IDE drives.

IIRC, the GCC Hyperdrive used an IDE drive (more correctly, ST-506, which became IDE), but with a goofy connector. I am not sure of this, however -- it's just been too many years since I opened one up. Mine was given to me by a friend who worked at GCC. I should've paid more attention to what he told me about the drive details.

[JDW]

Was this kit made for the 512?

It was made especially for the original Mac 512k, with original 64k ROMs, yes.

the GCC Hyperdrive used an IDE drive (more correctly, ST-506, which became IDE), but with a goofy connector.

Both "goofy" connectors may be seen at the back of the drive in this photo. And once again, there are two separate ribbon cables that lead from each of these drive connectors to the Hyperdrive controller card, which sits atop the logic board.

[Unknown_K]

I appreciate the comments, especially the link. I see that Picasa allows a large photo size (1600px) than Flickr (1024px). I'm a resolution fanatic, so this appeals to me. I may need to transfer everything to Picasa at some point! But I still like many Flickr features, and the 68kMLA Flickr Group is nice too.

I have seen a few people using Picasa and setting it up was easy, you get 1GB of storage space free (or more) I think, so that would work for me. Pictures can be private or public.

When I get around to it I will rename and dump a bunch more of what I have (since I have tons of room left).

[tomlee59]

Thanks for the closeup of the connector, JDW. I checked around the web to see if my memory was totally gone (it probably is). The ST506 interface pinout seems to match what you've got, from the few grounds that I could see in the photo. That squares with my shaky memory.

The Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST-506) has the pinout; maybe, if you ever feel so inclined, you can check if it seems to plausibly match what you see.

[JDW]

Tom, many thanks for the Wiki link. I just read the article and it talks about the ST-506 being a full-height 5.25" drive. The Hyperdrive in my 512 is a half-height 5.25". So either the Wiki article is incorrect or this Hyperdrive is not an ST-506.

[tomlee59]

The Seagate ST506 was indeed a full height drive, but the interface that it pioneered became a de facto standard used by many other drives (and in fact is the ancestor of IDE/ATA). The drive in the GCC is certainly not an ST506, but its interface may be. That's what I was referring to.

[JDW]

The GCC HyperDrive mechanism cannot possibly be an ST-506. Why? Because the ST-506 was a 5MB drive and GCC only release 10MB and 20MB variants of the HyperDrive. Also, the ST-506 and ST-xx series drives were made by Seagate. But the label on my 20MB GCC Hyperdrive indicates MMi was the manufacturer:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66071596@N00/527590168/

Nevertheless, I cannot find much of anything on MMi. Hence, I am curious if MMi didn't just slap a label on an NEC drive. If you have a look at my Flickr photo of the Hyperdrive, it looks very similar (yet a tad different) to the NEC D5126H shown half way down this web page:

http://www.redhill.net.au/d/d-a.html

[tomlee59]

Yes, again, we are in agreement that the drive is not an ST506. I reiterate that I am using the term more generally (as it was used in the '80s) to refer to the family of interfaces based on the one pioneered by Seagate in the '506. It became a de facto standard used by many makers of hard drives, not just Seagate.

[JDW]

With an utter dearth of information about "MMi" (the company mentioned on the label affixed to my HyperDrive20 drive mechanism), I decided to write GCC. GCC currently makes laser printers (and has for many, many years) but prior to that they made HyperDrives (and prior to the Hyperdrive they were into video games). Donna from GCC was kind enough to provide us with the following response today:

This is what I found.

mmi was *not* a drive manufacturer, they were an IC manufacturer, MiniScribe
was the drive vendor, the original hyper drive products for Mac plus didn't
not change the processor type, in fact it clipped onto the processor we did
a product for the Mac se called 'hypercharger 020' which upgraded the
processor from a 68000 to 68020. The MMI that is well known is 'monolithic
memories inc' they did earlier devices called PALs P)rogrammable (A)rray
(L)ogicwe we were a very large customer of theirs in the early days

PALs at the time allowed use to produce more compact designs (as well as
hide elements of the design from copiers/counterfitters)

This came from our engineering department.

So while she does not appear to know the specific model, she does indicate the drive mechanism is MiniScribe. She does refer to the Mac Plus and a Plus related accelerator product, which came later than the HyperDrive 20. But I am assuming that her comments about MiniScribe also cover the hard drive mechanisms used in the early HyperDrive 10 and 20 models.

[Mac128]

Here's some nice pictures of one installed in a MacPlus, possibly newer variety?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.ph ... stcount=18

[TheNixer]

I just bought the Mac Plus mentioned above off eBay. It should be here tomorrow.

[68Kollector]

I got rid of my 512k with hyperdrive, in really crappy condition, plus it sold for $193!!!

[lee4hmz]

To attempt to straighten all this out:

The "ST-506" interface is actually a superset of the old Shugart floppy bus (which PCs still use, incidentally). The wide cable has the control signals, and the narrow 20-pin cable carries the data (raw data with MFM or RLL applied and all the formatting marks and ECC bytes present).

Just like a floppy drive, to read and write, you set a direction, send pulses to the drive to move the head stepper motor, then pick a head, set the write gate and start reading or writing. The "WD1010" on the GCC board is what manages all this; all the Mac has to do is tell it what cylinder/head/sector to go to, and it goes. (You can also do tricks with the ST-506 interface like "buffered seek", where you can send pulses to the drive as fast as it can take them, then tell it to seek; if you ever see a drive supporting the "ST-412" interface, that basically means the drive supports buffered seek. The original ST-506 couldn't do this because it didn't have a CPU!)

Incidentally, the ESDI interface some high-end drives of the era used is similar to ST-506/412, but supports a lot more features. It's to the older spec what SmartPort is to Disk ][. It's not likely you'd ever see an ESDI drive in a Mac, though some makers (CDC and Maxtor in particular) slapped SCSI interfaces on their ESDI drives once it was obvious ESDI was dying.

The hard disk in JDW's unit isn't a MiniScribe. If it were, it'd be something of the 8425 persuasion, which (among other things) has the ICs facing out on the logic board, and has a sticker on top with the date of manufacture and "MiniScribe - QUALITY" printed on it. MMI doesn't seem to be well-known, but I did find some info in them in the old TheRef guide, as "Micro Memories", and it would seem they were based in Chatsworth, CA -- also home to Pertec, Micropolis and CMI (all related in one way or another). MMI in particular was either a subsidiary or spinoff of CMI, since the drive looks like a smaller CMI 6000 (the drive that caused IBM a huge amount of trouble back in 1985). The golden top, the cheap serial number tag and the red and white warranty seal are the giveaways.

[JDW]

I've been speaking with an individual outside our forum who once was a GCC HyperDrive dealer. He had some interesting info to share, and he encouraged me to remove my drive mechanism so I could post some photos for him. Apparently the mechanism I have is quite unusual, and it's not a latter revision HyperDrive either. It's funny but after all this time, no one still knows anything about my mystery drive.

Anyway, here is the 720p video I made of the HyperDrive's shock absorbers:
http://youtu.be/hIEC0CsrAxs

And here are my photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1033656723 ... eMechanism

Be sure to click on the little magnifying glass icon to zoom in and see all the detail. Picasa blows Flickr away in that regard (when it comes to a free account), although I prefer Flickr better for making nicer text commentary beneath the photos.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts or insights you have on my drive mechanism.

Thanks.

[Mac128]

the GCC Hyperdrive used an IDE drive (more correctly, ST-506, which became IDE), but with a goofy connector.

Just re-reading this, it's interesting to me that the first successful hard drive for the Mac (even Apple used them internally, and reluctantly waived the voided warranty policy if customers installed them), was essentially IDE based. Essentially, Apple rejected the third party solution, and went with SCSI (for better or worse), only to eventually move back to IDE less than a decade later. NIH (not invented here) policy at it's best.

I'd like to know if Jobs was involved with the development of the SCSI interface or not. Considering Apple rushed a non-standard version of it to Market 9 months after Jobs was removed as head of the Macintosh division, it could well have been a scramble after his departure. Based on what I've read about the re-design of the Macintosh case for the Plus by Frogdesign, it appears Jobs had little input on at least the appearance. Then again, it's hard to believe even Jobs could have ignored the success of the Hyperdrive ... So perhaps SCSI was the compromise, a faster connection port for an external drive, but still no internal drive or fan. Adding a fan would have been a simple matter for the Plus, as Pina's book describes ... And considering the problems the fanless Mac caused, one would think that would have been the first problem Apple engineers rectified after Job's departure ...

[Gorgonops]

... was essentially IDE based...

Just to clarify this point (Granted, it's beating a dead horse.):

(Classic parallel) IDE is actually a subset of the IBM AT's 16 bit ISA bus. Technically the only connection it has to the MFM/RLL ST-506 hard drive connector standard is from a software standpoint the original IDE drive's programming interface emulated the command set of the Western Digital WD1003 hard drive controller used in the original IBM AT. The "Hyperdrive" is only "essentially IDE" insofar that it uses a discrete controller chip on what's essentially a "PDS" bus. (ISA can pretty much be thought of as an 80286 PDS slot, with DMA and interrupt controller functions tacked-on.)

To understand the difference between ST-506 and IDE, well... think of the difference between a bare floppy drive and a USB floppy. A bare floppy drive is cabled to a controller integrated into the host computer, and said controller has the job of translating high-level data transfer and control commands into the appropriate signals to control the mechanical components of the drive directly. The limitation with this sort of system is that a given controller can only work with floppy drives who's mechanisms are self-similar enough to use the same set of mechanical commands. Without some fugly hacking it is thus impossible to use an existing floppy controller to control some new-fangled "superfloppy" that, say, has more heads or uses a faster data rate. A USB floppy, by contrast, adds "intelligence" the the drive itself, allowing the drive to reside on a general purpose bus which can be shared with other devices which use completely different mechanisms. (like hard drives, flash keys, etc.)

Early IDE drives fairly literally were just ST-506 hard drives with the stripped-down equivalent of a WD1003 integrated onto the drives's circuit board. It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive that integrating more "intelligence" onto the drive would make the drives cheaper than the drive portion of existing two-piece controller/drive combinations, but by integrating the controller on the board manufacturers were freed from having to make their drive mechanisms adhere to any existing limiting data encoding or transfer conventions, allowing the amount of data crammed onto a drive to increase much faster than it would be able to otherwise.

SCSI followed exactly the same evolutionary path. Early SCSI "drives" were generally composed of an ST-506-cabled MFM or RLL mechanism cabled to an external controller board containing an ST-506 controller and a SCSI transceiver chip, and only later did the drives start integrating the SCSI transceivers and controllers onto the drives themselves. Really the only difference is that SCSI was a "synthetic" standard designed from scratch to be a robust multi-purpose bus usable internally or externally on long cables with many devices while IDE is a simple, cheap shortcut designed for software compatibility with an existing standard (the AT BIOS) and capacity needs typical of small home and office computers in mind. (It was pretty rare for anyone to have more than one hard drive back then, so IDE being limited to two per cable seemed adequate at the time.)

Anyway, blawblawblaw. SCSI probably was the "correct" choice for Apple at least on the Mac Plus, since they were insisting at the time that hard drives needed to live externally and IDE isn't appropriate for cable lengths over about 2 feet, but it did saddle Mac machines with needing "overpriced" drives for a decade to come. Probably apropos considering how much they overcharged for their hardware generally, but nonetheless...

[JDW]

Mac128 and Gorgonops, thank you for the interesting discussion on IDE. However, as I have repeatedly said throughout this thread to everyone who has brought up that ST-506 drive, the drive mechanism used in my HyperDrive Mac512 is NOT an ST-506. The drive case is different. The controller is different. Again, go to my previous post in this thread and examine every single photo. Peer closely at the circuit board components. Now consider the name "MMI — Microcomputer Memories Inc." There is an absolute dearth of info on that company, with the exception of this LA Times article that says they were 3 years old as of August 1985:
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-08-13/ ... 1_net-loss

And here is what my GCC HyperDrive Dealer friend told me a few days ago:

I was involved during the peak period circa 1985-86. I knew that they went-on after me but for how long who knows. I assumed that the release of the external drive was the end of the line. When I saw your design I knew it was different than the iterations I had seen. In particular the simplified drive mounting chassis (which appeared to achieve the same thing with fewer manufacturing steps) and the the full CPU access through an expansion connector on the controller card lead me to think that maybe this is what the hyperdrive had evolved to as they made preparation for the 2000 integration/rollout. The fact that the board was a 512K board only in physical layout was explained to me by the fact that it indeed said 512 and therefore maybe they had two unique boards for the 512 and plus solutions. If I had seen for example that you had case labeling with red in the logos or using an acrylic bubble or early graphics then that would have immediately shook me out of my funk and it would have clicked. There was just enough details in the technical photos to indicate change with no case photos to clearly date it. My mistake.

However, it wasn't until I looked at a 2.0 board with the fully contoured back edges to deal with the SIMMs of the Plus and the revisions of the components on your board that it finally began to click. I was correct that your machine bookended my experience with the series, but since the majority of the unknown to me was after I left computer servicing, I had incorrectly assumed it was there that it belonged.

Actually your board predates everything I have. The design is similar to my 512K only v1.1, but still not the same. The components are earlier and the firmware earlier. Even the v1.1 setup has a nearly completely enclosed drive chassis that makes routing the analog and hard and floppy drive cables a pain. It's quite a bit more rigid and likely shielded but I'm not sure what problem they were trying to solve. I don't think it was the cause of their drive failures, but evidently somebody did because it costs money to make production changes like that. As you know your drive setup is flipped 180 degrees with a shortest path route.

So you have my collection beat for date to the marketplace I have no parts like it.

Details surrounding the drive mechanism I have are still a mystery. But clearly, my drive mechanism is not an ST-506. Any insights or history on the specific drive mechanism that I have would be appreciated.