Seagate’s European marketing team along with ZD Net embarked on a challenge to find the oldest working Seagate hard drive in the UK. (click here for details). Here is what was found according to The Register:
ST-412
10.0MB capacity
5.25-inch form factor
3600 RPM
4.1 lbs
Born on date: 1983
Age: 28 years
Approximate cost in 1983: $463
That’s a cost per megabyte of $46.30. Convert that to today’s cost per gigabyte measuring stick, and it would be $46,300!. Measured in terabytes which is where we are heading… $46,300,000.00 At least one thing has dropped in price over the past 28 years. Check how that compares to the new Barracuda XT 3.0TB
Puts my 6 year old Seagate Barracuda 500GB to shame.
What’s your oldest running hard drive?
More Just for Fun
I’ve got a couple of 540 MBs and one 200+ MB lying around here, haven’t checked if they’re still working tho 🙂
I was hired at Seagate to work on the ST-412 and have a working one also!
@Paul Tedrow Awesome Paul!
Why don’t they make a 5.25″ drive now? It could go in a DVD bay and have 12Tb or something usefull like that.
@Chris Gordon Hey Chris … good question. Much of the reason boils down to cost. The costs of producing a 5.25-inch platter far outweigh those of a 3.5-inch platter. So, say we put 3.5-inch platters in a 5.25-inch assembly. Then the roadblock would be reliability. That many disks and heads in a single hard drive assembly would not only be a huge power suck, it would produce a ton of heat and prove very problematic. Not to mention be very expensive to produce and sell. I am sure there are many more reasons our engineers can come up with, but those are the ones that pop into my head. Good thinking though! Thanks! – Mark
Wouldn’t a 5.25″ disk have to have a much lower spin speed due to the rotational or centripetal forces, thus creating much greater rotational latency, not much faster data read/write rate at the outside and much slower speed in the centre of the disk?
[…] store 600,000x more data than you could 30 years ago when comparing the 5MB hard drive “dinosaur” found alive vs the 3.0TB hard drives available today. At the same time the amount of digital content worldwide […]
I still have my 1st HDD, a 10 MB Xebec brand hard that was born in October of 1985. This drive was packaged and sold as The Sider from First Class Peripherals. It was designed to be used with the Apple II series computers. It came with with 2 complete manuals. 4 floppy disks, AC power cord, interface card, external and internal data cable with bracket, SASI terminator, and a quick start guide. All in all a very nicely executed package for a little over $600.00
This drive, in its external enclosure with power supply and controller boards, is 15″ x 7″ x 3″, with a weight of over 7 pounds. The actual drive mechanics taking up fully 1/2 of that space! The platters are over 5-inches in diameter and spin ~3,000 RPM. It uses a metal band/pulley system to move the heads; very much like a laundry line.
This particular hard disk was used to run a BBS back in the day. I used it for about 4 years till I outgrew the Apple II’s capabilities and moved into the PC world. I put the drive in storage and have not powered it up until this year. It worked fine and sounded exactly the same. I put it away and will check it again in 10 years.
This particular drive is over 26 years old. And by today’s standards quite the dinosaur. It can hold 3 or 4 digital photos. Or perhaps 1 or 2 high-quality .MP3 files! Then it’s DISK FULL! It would also take a good number of minutes to write those if you were to actually save them..
I have a working ST31276A (1.2G Medalist series) still in active 24/7 service. It has Red Hat Linux 8.0 installed on it since March 2003, the Pentium 200-MMX it is in serves as a firewall, proxy server, and VPN endpoint. Too bad its SMART support is too old to track power on hours, I guess it would be somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 hours at this point. It has 0 reallocated sectors.