The world's largest IDE hard drive failed on me

Why it's probably not a good idea to trust any data to a 17½-year-old hard drive, even if it is the largest-capacity (750 GB) and one of the last IDE (Parallel ATA) hard drives ever made.

Time flow:
0:00 Introduction
2:13 USB test
4:58 Desktop PC test
8:18 Transplant
10:18 Conclusion

#RetroTech #HardDrive #PC

[mercatorpotater]

This channel is like the anti Linus Tech Tips. All the stuff is old and/or cheap, the video quality is fantastically standard, the humor is wonderfully dry - but it all still works, and it's fine. What more do you need? Plus, you haven't tried to sell me a $70 screwdriver, or put in a segue, to our sponsor.

[BostjanTroha-Karo]

I love these videos. From SD resolution and 90s phone ringing, to inactivated Windows and voice pitch change when reading numbers. Awesome stuff!

[bsdjunkie]

400GB IDE drive is a total score at $3.99.

[megabojan]

My first IDE hard drive from 2002 is still alive somehow. It's a Maxtor 40GB and it's the loudest hard drive I've ever owned. But extremely reliable.

[CARLiCON]

so technically the HD didn't fail, the enclosure failed

[nyccollin]

Anyone else expecting a physically huge IDE drive that made the Quantum Bigfoot or an old MFM look tiny by comparison?

[SmilyTheMare]

the feels when the hd lives longer than at least 2 external enclosures damn

[singinglawnchair]

6:56 - a rather cheerful sounding warning chime...

"Uh oh :3 something's wrong :3"

[KRZZY]

That phone ringing actually made me look around for which phone was ringing!

[gordonfreeman]

I absolutely adore your content. Watching your videos feels like getting cozy with a warm cup of tea on a chilly night.

[BigJimSportsCamper]

I took a tour of the Voice of America facility in downtown Washington a few years ago, RIP VOA.

[DarkKnight]

You've said that old data is not important, but this is actually the complete opposite of what you should do with potentially dying hard drives if you need what's on them. Do not try to plug it multiple times to different systems, do not ever start any Checkdisk “repairs” that destroy what it finds incorrect (graphical check does the same thing as console check), do not try to move the files via file manager if there might be errors. First, attach it directly to a known working system, and use dd-rescue (or similar tool) to make an image of all (currently readable) sectors from start to finish (maybe after multiple passes), then work with that image to copy/fix the data. Even if the failure is limited to certain sectors, and disk generally continues to work fine, you'd better perform write test for the whole surface (to auto-remap the potential new problems).

[mayw]

I've rescued many hard drives from failing enclosures, it's almost always the enclosure in my experience.

Even if it's probably best not to trust that old a hard drive for mission critical uses, i've still found 'em useful. I have a pair of 500 GB Hitachi Sata drives that came out of a Lacie "1TB" dual enclosure (one of those Firewire 800 ones) and they now boot Windows XP and run games flawlessly :)

[Arc-Trinity]

I found an external SSD caddy on a wall at 1am while on a walk, bought it home with me and it works, so now it has 2 SSDs sitting within it. One of them being a Kingston SSD which failed in my 17 inch MacBook Pro. This was an interesting watch.

[Racecar]

Hi VWestlife! It's good to see you are still around doing these videos. I used to watch your channel back in 2015 and I was a big fan as a fellow old tech lover! You had inspired me to write some articles and make a couple of videos every now and again. Just wanted to leave that here :) keep doing what you're doing!

[UKSCIENCEORG]

The guy on the phone was time travelling future you to say Throw that drive in the trash'

[UserUser-zcfx]

I have a bunch of these. These were made in the mid to late 2000s. This was the era of the capacitor plague as well as the 2000s quality control plague as a lot of manufacturing of more complex electronics like circuit-boards shifted out of Taiwan and into places like China, Vietnam and Malaysia. There is a LOT of stuff from this era that is breaking down much sooner than previous eras of tech.

[jimbo]

Those cheap enclosures were a good way to get read/write errors on your drive.

[sprintst]

Fun fact. Iomega did some great consumer products as we know, ZIP drive etc. but by mid 2000s these were becoming irrelevant and outdated. The brand Iomega was acquired in 2008 by EMC as they were called then, to the surprise of those of us who work with their enterprise products which are mainly enterprise-grade storage arrays - massive multimillion$ cabinets full of HD (then, mainly flash now) serving enterprises with super-performant storage with redundancy, replication across sites etc. so this being an Iomega product with a big ol’ HD in it was interesting to me. EMC then merged with Dell in 2016 and rebranded to DellEMC for the enterprise storage market.

[hs_doubbing]

Heh! Funny timing, I just thought about this 750 GB drive of yours a few days ago while I was dealing with some old PC stuff of my own. I remember when you got that drive. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time, just learning how to do the whole internet thing. Not really sure why it randomly came to mind the other day. :)