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:




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.php?p=4882071&postcount=18

 

[TheNixer]

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