The other night I was flipping through an old 1995 Computer Shopper, like you do, and wondered what the largest hard drive for sale at the time was.
Turns out it’s a Seagate ST410800N, 9 gigabyte, 5.25″ full height, SCSI drive. In other words the biggest physical form factor PC drive. Virtually all other new hard drives around this time were 3.5″ either in the half-height or now familiar 1″ height format, but this dude was 5.25″ FH. I do have experience with this form factor, such as the classic 5 megabyte ST-506 MFM and the 10 megabyte models that came in some of the IBM XTs. This one just stored 900 million times the amount of data.
Hard Drives International 1995
I kind of wanted a SCSI drive for a Novell NetWare server I had been considering building, so I could finally learn more about old SCSI. After seeing this, why shouldn’t I put the biggest, highest capacity SCSI drive in my file server? Off to eBay I went and found a really good deal on one and bought it.
The next day the eBay seller actually called me up and asked if I intended on using this or just scrap it for precious metals. I can’t imagine there’s that much rare metal in these but I don’t know. I told him I wanted to take a gamble on trying to use it, he said “alright I’ll do a good job packing it for you then.”
Sure enough, a big box arrives containing packing and another box, which contained more packing and the hard drive.
I finally got around to dissecting one of my 486s to test out the drive on an Adaptec 2840VL local bus SCSI card, and hooked it all up on my coffee table.
I wasn’t sure if it was actually going to work but I knew it would probably be a loud drive so recorded video and flipped the switch to turn it all on. Sure enough it took several seconds for the drive to get up to operating speed, a loud metallic ping of the heads releasing and then the noise of seeking.
Adaptec AHA-2840VL and ST4100800N
Miraculously, the previously untested Adaptec AH-4840VL SCSI controller just worked without needing any jiggling or finagling of my touchy VL-bus slots, and the hard drive appeared on the SCSI bus.
Media verify
From the Adaptec SCSISelect utility I started a media verify test to see how much damage the drive had. This ran for a few hours and either had zero bad sectors or they were quietly reallocated and the entire drive was still usable!
I installed MS-DOS on it, the fdisk and formatting had no problems with it being a 9 GB drive. Fdisk just created a 2 GB primary partition and MS-DOS used all of that as C:. Installed Norton Utilities and SpinRite on it too and let them run for a while, they all seemed happy with the drive too.
As far as drive performance, SpinRite tells me it’s doing about 3 megabyte/second transfers. I’m not yet an expert at SCSI but the SCSI-1 spec is 5 MB/sec, so I’d expect something around there, especially with the VL-bus SCSI adapter. I haven’t figured it out yet, may be a termination or cable problem maybe.
What I figured out the next day was that the PCB should have been on top, so I had been running this thing upside down all night long. All previous drives I’ve used like this such as the ST-506 and XT drive, the PCB was on the bottom. After turning it right side up it went squirrelly a few boots. A couple of times the Adaptec complained the host adapter wasn’t found, and a few times MS-DOS said the drive was read-only. Eventually whatever was stuck or misaligned fixed itself and it’s been running fine in the correct orientation ever since.
I had shot some video of the formatting and verification, and threw together a short video of the drive powering on and uploaded to Instagram reels.
Popularity
What I wasn’t expecting was the IG reel to take off like wildfire in popularity. Most of my reels have a couple dozen views, this thing suddenly got thousands. The likes and comments started pouring in, soon I had 100k views. People calling each other names. Then 250k, then 500k. Now I’m over 700,00 views, nearly a thousand comments, and 28k likes. Clearly the sound of this thing spinning up got people’s attention!
Looking through the comments, the breakdown seems to be something like this:
- 80% posting a comment about how it sounds like an air raid or tornado siren, or the THX logo.
- 15% can’t believe old tech used to be so loud/big/low capacity/expensive (I mean this was released 31 years ago), or maybe they haven’t been around long enough to see that today’s storage will be likely obsolete too.
- 2% bro why don’t you just buy a 2 TB flash card for $20
- Several people commented this exact same drive was used in Avid Media rigs they used for non-linear video editing and rendering. Sizes seemed to range from a couple of drives to an entire rack of 42 drives on multiple SCSI controllers.
- At least three people said it was a fake or said it’s clearly an IDE drive dummy, despite the bigass 50-pin ribbon cable and the “Adaptec SCSI” screen.
- At least one person stole the video, cropped it, and re-posted it to Threads as their own video.
The Avid comments were interesting. I tried to find photos of mid-1990s Avid setups but came up short.
The drive is still pretty noisy even inside a case so I’m not sure how well that’s going to work for a full time NetWare server. It might have to sit around for special occasions.
The video:
View this post on Instagram
(jesus that’s a lot of css for an embed, IG)
