10 years spinning and still going strong

[hello_hello]

Old Clunker celebrated his ten year spinnaversary recently (3741 days of power up time), and I forgot about it, so to make it up to him....

His nickname's due to him being a little noisy, and in summer he can get hot enough to cause pain if you pick him up, but he's not showing any sign of having to give up his unconventional "on the floor" lifestyle, and he seems quite happy to be working 24/7....aside from an occasional break when the cat plays behind the desk and disconnects one of his cables.

Happy 10 years of almost non-stop spinning to "Old Clunker".

[microchip8]

I have a Maxtor that just wouldn't die. Sadly I no longer use it as it's small in capacity and I no longer have an IDE port (yeah, I know there are adapters)

[hello_hello]

There's a 20GB, or maybe a 40GB, Maxtor drive in an old Pentium 3 PC here. It's only used an hour or two per day for playing card games now, but it must be 20 years old. When that drive dies I guess it'll be time to finally ditch the PC, as it's the last surviving IDE drive and I'm pretty sure there's no SATA connectors on the MB. It's too old to be stuffing around with it when the drive finally gives up.

[StainlessS]

I like Maxtor, got a 3.5" 320GB external [with Maxtor emblazened on the side so the entire shabang is maxtor], never had a minutes worry about
it, just keep on going like the Energizer bunny. chucked out a bunch of low cap drives bout 12 months ago, incl 10GB [maxtor again] which I
kinda loved, me and Max, we were inseparable.

I kinda avoid Western Digital now, they dont play nice in external hard drive docks, I have one WD drive that is readable in one of my three external docks,
but most of them dont work at all. I highly recommend the external dock, is real handy, can use old hard drive like an SD card, just plop it in [switch on] and go.
Two of mine support both SATA and IDE, 3.5 and 2.5, but one is SATA only.
Just looked it is [the SATA only dock, my favorite], still available from where I got mine, about £24.00 incl UK VAT and P&P:- https://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/pr...cking-Station/
Maybe I get another one. Its a bit light and 'plasticky', but I aint had any trouble with it and I've seen somewhere (either e-bay or Amazon) the same
one for about £50.00. I have a few Dynamode devices, cheap and cheerful but I aint had any probs with any of them.

An external dock is a great idea for accessing old drive easily and without screws and stuff, and if you look, you might find plentiful old drives at very low cost, I got about 24 2.5" 20GB drives for £0.50 each [old XBOX 360 drives, had to dismantle and take out the drive], and about another 10 assorted sizes 40GB -> 80GB for a bit more cost than the 20GB ones [again XBOX 360]. I got so many, I dont really know what to do with them, I just use them as SD cards, and maybe for boot tools, probably gonna install Linux or something on one or more of them [once installed can only boot from same machine/device as original install]. [Old XBOX 360 drive have usually not had an awful lot of use, even gamers dont play games 24/7]
And 2.5" drives are a nice size for a lable. [I would not bother with a 20GB 3.5 inch drive, but a 20GB 2.5 drive is handy, if I can think of a use for them].

I really reccommend external dock, wish I'de gotten one years and years ago.

EDIT: And, my old IDE PATA drives I use for Emergency - Emergency drives, and put them out of the way where will not be disturbed.
IDE [3.5"] drives are a bit more problematic in HD dock, usually takes a bit of fiddling to insert, as the power plugs are not a specified distance
from the ribbon connector, there is usualy some kind of slide mechanism which you have to mess with to get them to fit properley,
2.5 IDE are only slightly more awkward than SATA.

EDIT: Ignore the "One-button-Backup" stuff on HD docks adverts, they are just usually a shortcut key [on the dock itself] to start some PC based
backup software [which you sometimes get as free download link from manufacturer site].
However, one of my docks [has 2 drive bays, another has 3, my favorite linked one above only 1 bay] does do a RAW backup from one bay to the other, and without a PC connected, single push button to duplicate drive [target must be at least same size as source], but I've never used it.

[microchip8]

I used to be a fan of Maxtor back in the days. Seagate took them over so I moved on to Seagate. I'm not a fan of WD much. Just recently had to replace a WD Red in my NAS due to bad sectors only after 5000 hours of operation. Never had to replace a Maxtor or Seagate so soon as the WD Red. Also their recent shenanigans with Shingled recording and not mentionning it clearly is a deal breaker for me.

[FranceBB]

Happy Spinnaversary!



It's time to party!


Ah Maxtor... too bad they were killed ehm I mean "acquired" by Seagate...
Oh, back when Hard Disk manufacturers still knew what they were doing... :')

(actually they still know what they're doing but they're artificially making them fail sooner nowadays...)

Funny enough, I had plenty of Seagate HDDs who failed after few years, but my old Maxtor 40 GB Pata drive was still working and has been working from 1999 to 2011.
Noisy as f... and slow as hell, but it was still working and I bet it would still work if I take it from my closet and connect it to my computer...

[Boulder]

My oldest 1TB WD Green turns 10 years in a few months, 3566 days of power on time. I have several HDDs with over 2000 or 3000 days power on time, I guess I've just been lucky. I have a few replacement drives I bought a long time ago but never had to use them

[hello_hello]

I have three hard drive docks. One of them is a dual drive dock, two are single drive, and there's a fourth dual drive dock that no longer works (it's power supply died). "Old Clunker" is connected to the MB directly so the docks can be used for drives that aren't connected permanently.

Most of my hard drives are WD and they generally work fine in any dock, but the docks are connected via USB. Two of the docks have SATA and USB outputs, but I gave up connecting via SATA a long time ago. I assume it was because they wouldn't connect reliably, and at the time I blamed the docks and/or the MB's SATA controller., but maybe the WD drives were the problem. USB is rock solid, even though two of the docks are only USB2 and therefore rather slow.

Today I found myself reminiscing over the good old days when hard drives were respectable and wore their circuit boards on the inside.

[StainlessS]

One of my dock power supplies died on me too, so I got this one [way over spec'ed] :- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mains-Switc...9084153&sr=8-1

12V 6Amp, 5.5mmx2.1mm/2.5mm connector [fits both 2.1mm and 2.5mm plugs], I went way over spec so as to be able to use it with many other devices.
[original something like 1.5 Amp].

Most of my hard drives are WD and they generally work fine in any dock

That is strange, you were lucky, or, paid lots for yours. [all mine cheap and cheerful].
If you view questions and reviews on Amazon, there are loads of Q's asking if works with WD drives.

One of my docks is USB-2 and eSATA, eSATA aint even as fast as USB-2 [I think], I actually have both leads connected at times
[but usually leave out the eSATA] as mine will not boot to USB, but will boot to eSATA, once booted [EDIT: Into OS], USB-2 is used by the dock. [EDIT: I boot eSATA to boot tools, eg Macrium Reflect Rescue media].
[also, the dock has a bunch of card readers / USB stick ports, which dont work under eSATA only].

My first Hard drive cost me bout £400.00 for 20GB. [no it weren't solid gold].

EDIT: The WD drive that works in only one of my docks is an older 250GB drive, maybe its older drives that will work in your docks,
maybe if you try newer ones they will fail. [I've avoided the prob with my larger WD drives by using them as internal drives].

[hello_hello]

Most of the "loose" drives I use for backup/storage (in docks) are 2TB WD Green drives. I don't think they make the Green drives any more, but I have quite a few of them. The other drives I use in docks are a mixture of older drives that were removed from PCs and replaced with something larger. They're mostly 250GB & 500GB drives. At least 3 of them are WD.

This one's been sitting in a dock for a few days now. It's at least 8 years old but it's power on time is only 184 days, so I thought I'd give it some exercise (I'm watching a TV series stored on it).



Remember when Samsung made hard drives?



The first hard drive I considered buying was for a sampling keyboard back in the 80s. The best quote I got was $1000 (Australian) for a 100MB drive. Yes.... 100 megabytes. I decided to keep using floppy discs instead.

The first hard drive I owned came with a laptop. I think it had a massive 1GB capacity. I'm not sure this is the exact model, but it's close. Memories.....

I remember eventually dumping the laptop and building a Pentium 3 desktop containing two 20GB hard drives. At the time, all that storage was wonderful......

[FranceBB]

Oh Windows 95... I've never used it, I was far too young back then...
I wasn't really able to use anything 'till Windows 98 Second Edition came out, so 1999 when I've got my first computer, a desktop.

[StainlessS]

Yeah, W95 with that sexy red tile, the ultimate look that will never die.

[hello_hello]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Oh Windows 95... I've never used it, I was far too young back then...
I wasn't really able to use anything 'till Windows 98 Second Edition came out, so 1999 when I've got my first computer, a desktop.

At least you arrived just in time for the Y2K nonsense.

I was running a small business back then and I remember having to send out Y2k compliance forms to several of the companies I was dealing with at the time... the ones employing office workers who'd found Y2K was a new excuse to justify their existence.

[StainlessS]

Pre-Y2K,
I had to do a hack for Atarti-ST/STE (just for my own personal machine), same Y2K thing.
[Atari is/was official CPM/68K, for MC 68000 CPU, whereas MSDOS was basically a ripoff of CPM to run on 8080/8086 instead
of CPM's Z80. So, ATARI FAT16 almost exactly the same as MSDOS FAT16 - Boot Sector 0 is slightly different].
It was not an easy task to figure out a hack to slide past Y2K problem, and I recall that there was gonna be another Y2K type
event some years later, because the hack was just a bit of sticking plaster fix, next Y2K event is something like 2027, or maybe 2029, when more
uproar will likely ensue. [I'm guessin' that my hack would be pretty much the same as PC hack, there was not much else that could be done].
FAT16 is still in-use now, and dates still limited to 32 bit. Not sure what has transpired for FAT32, I think that was also limited to 32 bit too,
but with Long File Name stuff, they probably extended the dates as well, maybe. FAT16 was actually limited to 2 second steps, no milli-secs whotsit.

[hello_hello]

I worked in a music shop a couple of lifetimes ago, and the Atari was a popular music-workstation machine when MIDI was still all shiny and new.

That reminds me of the first time I ever saw a Windows PC. I'd lived with a guy who owned an Amiga in the early 80s, and I'd spent numerous hours playing games on the Atari instead of serving customers, and the first PC I saw was running Windows 3, or maybe 3.1. Compared to what the Atari and the Amiga were doing nearly 10 years before, I couldn't believe how horrible it was.

[StainlessS]

ST/STE/Falcon MIDI, this was probably what you were talkin' bout, Steinberg Cubase:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinberg_Cubase
[Maybe The Police, (Sting etc) used it, amongst others]

EDIT: At the end of Wikipedia page is list of notable users, The Police not mentioned.
However, Kraftwerk, Marillion, New Order,
are the only names that I recognise, although is for artists over a long period of time [1989 - present day].

[FranceBB]

Ah, Cubase... I know it, my uncle has been using it for years and still has a valid license.
On the other hand, I'm an AVID ProTools user so we don't get along hahahaha

(Actually it was him who introduced me to IT in the first place and I'll always be grateful. )

[hello_hello]

Cubase.... I'd forgotten the name.
I remember the Atari ST, because I'm pretty sure it was the first model with MIDI, and the STE, but I think I left the music shop before any newer models were released.

I read a little of the ST Wiki page. Single sided floppies..... I'd completely forgotten they existed, but now my memory's been nudged I do recall having to hunt around for double sided floppies at a decent price.... when they were new.

While it's in my head.... there was one particular game for the Atari ST I was quite addicted to in the 80's. It was a game of logic where you had to move through a maze while avoiding the stuff waiting to to kill you. I remember it being somewhat torturous because when you were killed you had to start playing from the beginning, rather than from the start of the current level again. In the end I probably could've played the first four of five levels blind-folded, I'd completed them so many times.

It was such a long time ago my brain could be inverting some memories, but assuming it's not, I'm pretty sure the game was "Xor" (pronounced "Zor"). I wouldn't mind checking it out again for old time's sake, but I have no idea where to look or even if it's likely to still exist.

[wonkey_monkey]

It's not the Atari version, but is this it? http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=558

It was such a long time ago my brain could be inverting some memories, but assuming it's not, I'm pretty sure the game was "Xor" (pronounced "Zor"). I wouldn't mind checking it out again for old time's sake, but I have no idea where to look or even if it's likely to still exist.

There's a small up-and-coming company called "Google" that might be able to help

[StainlessS]

There are Atari Emulators for PC/Linux Android and lots more,
and on a couple of DVD's you could probably fit an entire catalog of formerly commercial software, probably
descibed as Abandon Ware [some of mine is described as such somewhere, for QL, ST/STE and Amiga].
[I still got a real STE and Amiga 1200]