my video card got bigger....

 

I still have my very first physical hard drive..

Western Digital 40mb. Was 3.5" wide by 2.5" thick. Slower than **** too.

 

Not as impressively vintage, but no less bizarre, I wish I had kept one of those "Big Foot" drives from an old Compaq system I used to have.

What a stupid idea. lol.

 

My first hard drive was an MFM 10MB monster. 5 1/4". Connected it to an RLL controller and got about 50% more capacity of of it. Ever hear of miniscribe? The platters (2 of 'em) made a nice clock.

 

Oh yeah, I remember when the super-thin yet ultra-wide bigfoots came out. IBM used 'em in a bunch of their machines. I think my exact words were something along the lines of "What the **** is this? Didn't we stop building 5.25" hard drives ten years ago?"

I was kind of a late adopter when hard drives came out, largely because I couldn't afford one. My first drive was an ST296N (80MB, SCSI, 5.25" half-height) that bought when I upgraded from an 8088 to a 16 Mhz 286. My second hard drive, however, was pretty impressive. It was a used 100 meg SCSI 5.25" full-height unit made by Control Data Corp. (For those who don't go back this far, a common desktop CD/DVD-ROM drive is half-height. Two of 'em stacked together would be a full-height drive.) The unusual thing is that it was nearly a foot deep (front to back) as it had a linear servo driving the heads straight in and out- none of this stepper motor business.

@ jayc72, wow, I'd totally forgotten about doing MFM/RLL conversions. I doubt if 1% of the folks on the 'net today have ever even seen a hard drive with seperate data and control cables.

Who here remembers Conner? Shugart? Rodime?





Incidentally, I'd thought that MicroDrive (1 inch) was the smallest form-factor out there, but it turns out that Toshiba now has a 0.85" drive in 2GB and 4GB capacities, models MK2001MTN and MK4001MTD, which weigh 5.7 grams.







I guess my biggest question is why? MicroSD cards are smaller than my thumbnail, and currently hold 16 GB at about $50. Proper SSDs are getting cheap too.



The big question: Anybody here remember core?

 

our pc xt had a full height hd. right next to the 360K 5-1/4 floppy drive.
our mac plus had an external 20mb scsi drive. I forget the brand. FX/FI or something?

incidentally, was it IBM that first created the little 1" square logo sticker that graced many a "pc clone" computer case for years to follow?

 

Its pretty sick to think back to when I was a kid and we used those brown computers with the green screen...and now the phone I carry has more computing power just 20-years later. It doesn't have removable storage though...lol.