HD20 Photos

[JDW]

Here are some Apple HD20 Photos I recently uploaded. They show the outside and inside of the drive, including some closeups of the Rodime mechanism and Apple controller card. This drive is still in good working order and serves me well on a Mac 512k (original 64k ROMs). It's faster than a floppy (of course), but not as fast as the GCC Hyperdrive 20 (which I also own). The Hyperdrive feels more like a SCSI drive attached to a Plus.

Anyway, enjoy.

 

[defor]

nice pics- i'd love to see your photo setup- it looks like the background has been replaced, but still really professional looking

My hd20 and cdsc hacen't been cleaned for years .. i should probably do that one of these days then diagnose why the cdsc isn't spinning discs anymore.

 

[MultiFinder]

Ooo, that's cool. It's always fun looking at old hardware and comparing it to what you get today.

 

[Patrickool93]

Wow, that had to be sooo expensive when it was new....That's a 5.25" drive, right?

 

[MacG4]

i got one of those hd20's free a few years ago. it is being used currently w/ my mac plus

 

[Bunsen]

Anyone got a dead HD20 they'd be willing to ship me just the housing from?

 

[wgoodf]

nice pics-really professional looking

indeed very nice indeed.

thanks for sharing

 

[JDW]

nice pics- i'd love to see your photo setup- it looks like the background has been replaced...

All my photos on Flickr were shot with either a Canon PowerShot G2 or G5, with stock lens and no flash (camera sat on a tripod). I used RAW mode (not JPEG) for most shots.

You can see that I had shot the bulk of those HD20 photos first, a number a weeks ago. I then shot the last two in a light diffusion Cube with a gray gradation background yesterday. Yesterday was a cloudy day so I went outside and shot them in my Cube. It would be nice to have a studio with lights, but I lack space (and cash) for that and my only option for a good light source is to go outside. You can still get good shots in the Cube even on sunny days, but the shadows become much softer on cloudy days. This Cube cost about $50 and it folds up and packs away nicely. Of couse, having Photoshop to clean up and sharpen the photos helps quite a lot too, but I didn't replace the background in Photoshop -- just sharpened, set the longest side to 1024 pixels (for Flickr), adjusted levels/curve and fixed color casts.

My intent in shooting these photos is nothing more than a hobby and my love for classic Mac hardware. I try to shoot photos with the understanding that other people will scrutinize them. I've seen a lot of bad photography on the web with regard to classic Mac equipment, especially the circuit boards. Sometimes I want to see a chip part number in someone else's photo, but it's impossible because either the resolution is too low or they blurred the photo or it was shot with a flash and hard shadows mask out the number. So I've tried to shoot my own photos with the mindset of not making those same mistakes myself. And perhaps it might have a trickle-down affect on some who will strive to shoot better photos for us all. As I said, it doesn't take much more than a low cost Canon camera and tripod most of the time (those two HD20 photos were the only ones I've posted on Flickr that I shot in my light Cube so far).

Thanks for the comments.

 

[Scott Baret]

What sort of mechanism was used inside the HD20? Was it a MiniScribe?

 

[JDW]

As mentioned in the opening post in this thread and in the comments in my photos themselves, the drive is a Rodime. It is 5.25 inch, half-height in physical size. See my closeup photo of the sticker on the drive itself for more information.

 

[Scott Baret]

My bad, didn't catch that.

Rodime was one of the least reliable drive makers of the 1980s. By the time I was tech supporting in 1992 they had mostly died out and I've only come across one Rodime drive in practice--which happened to be deceased.