Concerns about my collection hard drives.

[CC_333]

Well, I agree with Techknight, the drive is junk if there are grooves eteched into the platter. There's a chance it still sort of works, but it'll never be reliable or trustworthy, and there are likely going to be many errors in formatting it.

Maybe to prevent this in the future, try carefully opening up the drives and lifting the head off the platter and blowing, as you did with this drive? If you do that, it will at least reduce the possibility some.

I should probably check out some of my drives, but I think at least some of them will probably still work, I hope.

Good luck with the rest of your drives!

c

 

[uniserver]

yeah you could use that adaptor but, you will still need some termination, something like this would work…  witch is what i was buying before max made his adaptors.   http://www.ebay.com/itm/Passive-SCSI-Terminator-DB25-Male-/140943145282?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20d0ddb942 

 

[uniserver]

oh here is one with termination built in

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/SCA-80F-IDC-50M-Hard-Drive-Adapter-with-Active-Termination-SCSI-U320-U160-LVD-SE-/111079569749?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19dcdbb955

 

[uniserver]

haha here is one that is pretty reasonable … man its getting late i forgot to sort by price.

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Internal-SCSI-Adapter-80-Pin-SCA-to-68-Pin-Female-or-50-Pin-Male-/310390365299?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4844b51c73

 

[Paralel]

What technight meant was crap from inside the drive caused the head crash, not external crap.

 

[falen5]

took a trip to my local scrap yard today and guess what I scored

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2 IBM scsi drives in 2 old video monitoring machines. 1 had the 50 pin scsi connector the other has the sca 80, but that had a 80pin to 50 pin adapter

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plugged them in and they spin up. the third one the Seagate ,  I got from an old server months ago in the same place, wont spin up at all!!

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initialized them in Anubis and they seem to be fine.When formatting it says 'formatting drive with interleave of 1'.....is that normal with....all the old apple drives the interleave is always 0. I have no idea. The adapter thingy works perfect, though I don't think it will fit in a mac!

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1 thing is they both make a high pitch sound........its not the sound from the drive last night , as in a scraping sound of the head 'cutting' the platter.  Its a smooth, constant, high frequency sound of the rpm. Is that normal od these drives.

its a bit loud. But they seem to work fine. I backed up all my software onto both. My old external , the one that is starting to click, took 5 or 6 starts before it would come up , but it faithfully passed over all its software to the 2 scsi's

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feeling better about the drive fiasco

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anyone ever see this kind of SCA 80 to 50 pin adapter before

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cheers

 

[aplmak]

These drives tend to run a little warm btw..

 

[falen5]

from looking at all the various ways these drives fail I rekon the best thing is to remove them all from the machines, store them flat, with the platter facing up and just let them unsdisturbed until needed.

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when the time comes to use them, some time in the future, open them, check for liquefied rubber and remove/replace if possible. the rubber going bad should do no damage if the drive is not used...its only if the drive is turned on that the bad rubber will kil it.

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a kind of cryostasis for a hard drive. Thinking also about opening them up now, moving the heads/armature to the outside edge of the platter and lifting the heads of the platters with a small piece of plastic or something to avoid stiction ...which will happen if they are just left as they are. What about placing a piece of paper between the head and platter and then lowering the head back down again?... good/bad idea?

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uniserver, your process of removing the rubber seems best for my skillset, as I have never been able to get the heads off the platter safely ..........the thing is, for those drives with the rubber stop under the platter , if that is not replaced the head will crash into the spindal, but it can be controlled by the rubbers under the magnets. That's my understanding of it anyway.

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so that's a plan people...........store them all........and switch over to sca80.

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delighted with the 2 sca80 I have working....have allot more confidence in their lifespan

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great stuff.............its all good fun