Early 80's 5mb Hard Drive operating/seeking sound

I LOVE the sound of old hard drives and mechanical hard drives in general, so I thought I'd share it on the internet :P

[cessnafun]

The beautiful sound of every computer lab at 8:30 AM in 1987, with the ozone filling the air, people typing in BIOS Startup sequences, and loading in floppy disks. A bygone era that nobody in this age will ever experience.
















*Including me, I am only 16.*

[wolfdale_m]

Old days where hard drives used steppers for the actuation method. Imagine the inertia of that entire actuator plus motor assembly....

[garyr]

Imagine an entire room full of these things running. Sound like a jet taking off.

[MyComputerStudios_]

This is a Seagate ST251 from 1988-1989 and is 40MB not 5MB. A 5MB hdd would not autopark its head during spin down. It is likely 5MB due to bad sectors

[jamescoulthard]

I remember having to “park” the heads to keep them from “crashing” into the hard drive platters. The heads floated just above the disk platters, and they would land, making physical contact, destroying data, if you didn’t seek them to the landing zone before powering down. This one auto-parked on shutdown. This is also how the term “system crashed” came into vernacular for any time the computer faulted.

[Griffins]

The sheer amount of tech we’ve managed to create from some hot rocks and some more hot rocks combined with only our brain is nothing short of incredible. Thinking about it is mind boggling.

[Pinotki]

that hard drive sounds like a whole computer

[envitech]

I recall we had to type "Park" at the command prompt before shutting down. That was in 1990.

[princessalaina]

I can't even comprehend the geniuses who imagined, invented and designed these components.

[alaincraven]

The video size of this is orders of magnitude greater than the size of that drive

[napalm]

The technology seems so futuristic when you see it up close and personal, and to think it was early 80s

[steelfalconx]

I remember my first PC in 1994 had a 50mb hard drive. I thought we'd never fill that thing up.

[nomusicrc]

It's amazing with all those went through that they lasted so long

[dddevildogg]

Back in 1988 we needed a larger hard drive in the mainframe so the computer company sent a tech out to piggyback the 15 mb with a 30 mb.The bill was $5k The computer was branded by Insight and it weighed 120lbs, had massive motherboards and spools of wiring, it used a clunky slow tape cart backup that took 3-4 hours
We've come a long way, baby

[valuedcustomer]

Probably the most common 5 MB drive is the Shugart (later Seagate) ST-506, which was a full-height drive. It was superseded by the ST-412 (10 MB) and the half-height ST-225 (20 MB). As others have pointed out, the drive in this video is likely an ST-251 or ST-277.

[alzeNL]

ah, reminds me of the old days, servers in shelves with no cooling, run from powerstrips from mains outlets with no ups, mail server SCSI HDD spinning and making a crunching sound. Never forget those early days, happy memorys that seem so long ago.

[richardmiller]

I worked for a printing company back in the late 70's and the 5mb disc where the size of an LP. Funny how things so small.

[BarelySentientBraincell]

I know that SSD's are pushing out hard drives, but I just cannot stop appreciating the beauty of this technology. The mechanical precision especially. Etching data as a microscopic spiral of magnetic pattern on a disc made of metal. It's just beautiful in its very principle.

[CHguy]

When I first got my Compaq portable in 1984 it had 2 floppies. A year or so later I took out 1 floppy and put a Seagate 40mb in its place. The upgrade from floppy to HD was like night and day! WordPerfect was what got me through college! Dot matrix printer at first and then a 20 characters per second daisy wheel! 😂

[Turboy]

I remember when my best friend got his brand new 160 MB hard drive. So huge, it could practically hold the entire world on it. Man, those were fun times. When Prince Of Persia was a very graphically demanding game and if you had a Trident video card with 1 MB of RAM, you were in the ELITE class of PC enthusiasts.