Will it Run? (Hard Drive Edition)

I had a lot of enjoyment with this one. It does occur to me though that I'm going to need to do something about my camera situation. I film entirely using Samsung Galaxy phones and it always seems like with Samsung they start out nice and crisp but as years go by the cameras start losing focus and the autofocus in particular starts going nuts. Guess I'll start saving for a DSLR. BTW: did anyone get the 'shrimp' joke?

38 Minutes of hard drive testing, I can't believe I just watched that, but here we are. Fun as always 🙂

I absolutely love the "Impossible Mission" reference. "Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay foreverer!" One of my favourites. "Destroy him, my robots!"

Brad, I think you'll have more luck on round 2. Make sure the drives are all set to primary and then auto detect them all. Seems like sometimes you had them on secondary and maybe didn't auto detect when you changed it back to primary... And of course using the wrong head/cyl can result in an error, simply as it's trying to hit a sector that doesn't exist. As for orientation of the drives, by the point in time, it didn't matter and they would work however you had them positioned. So good luck, I bet you'll get a bunch more to work.

Always love the little comedy bits. Makes me chuckle.

Well that was a fun little romp down memory lane, if also triggering a bit of PTSD...as a WD man for 30+ years, there's just a almost indescribable change in sound they make when they start to fail, and once you've heard it, you never forget, because it would inevitably happen during dead week when you were trying to finish the paper that was 25% of your semester grade. And wow, WFW 3.11...In the 94-95 school year, of the 450 people that lived in my dorm, maybe 30 or 40 of us had our own computers, and probably 85% of those were all using the same copy of Windows. No copy protection whatsoever. Those were the days....

The comedy bits are great and I agree 100% about having the authentic experience of spinning platters vs flash storage. I get that these drives will stop working one day but in my opinion, that’s ever more reason to enjoy them while they’re here. I love the seeking sounds that early voice coil actuators make and the droning sound of the platters in motion.

Those old HDD sounds and so on really take me back! I loved the video! My first PC was a 486 DX2-66 that came with a Seagate 260 MB HDD. 2 of my friends had PCs at the time and that HDD dwarfed the size of the drives in their PCs at 40 MB and 105 MB. While the Seagate drive seemed quite large for the first couple of years I had the PC I quickly jumped on the Zip drive bandwagon for more cheap space with a SCSI Zip drive in early 1995. I later upgraded that 486 machine with a WD 1.2 GB HDD in 1996 which again seemed pretty huge when I bought it. My current desktop only has a M.2 NVMe drive in it but my NAS has a large array of SAS drives in it which make quite the delightful noise when they're busy!

The "I love history," during the prawn meeting made me laugh incoherently for 5 solid minutes.

Don't tell me, did he test any bricks?

Shout out to HiMem! (19:54) - As someone who once bought Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, I was on first name terms with HiMem. The game required 600+ kb of conventional memory. Through months of fiddling and creative use of HiMem. I finally managed to create a boot disk that would leave me with 612 kb of conventional memory.

The PIII was my favorite vintage system. At that point, thing just started working without fussing with jumpers and bios config nightmares. If I set up a vintage PC, that is as far as I would go back other than reviving my old Heathkit H8 CP/M setup; hows that for vintage ;)

I agree about Windows 95. It was a huge PITA for gaming. That's why there were DOS version of games for so long. The first game I played in windows 95 was Jedi Knight because I was super hype for it and it didn't have a DOS version

I'm always really looking forward to your videos! Thanks for doing what you're doing, i like that besides the educational value of your content, your videos are very entertaining. Either of these things could totally stand on their own quality-wise, but together, man, what a package. Thanks!

Heh, used to deal with drives a lot back in the day. Likely nothing wrong with your test rig -- things were just more picky at the time. You will absolutely have to auto-detect every drive, every time. On those old AMI BIOSs, some drives will only work when they're set to "master", others will only work using "cable select", very few if any will boot when set to "slave". Good luck!

I would recommend making sure they all have the jumpers set to master. Some old IDE drives may not work properly on their own if you have them set to slave, and the computer's BIOS may not recognize a slave drive as bootable.

My quantex 486 came with 3.11 for workgroups. Adrian's from his basement has quite a few of these videos and has some testing software that you might want to look into using for future projects. Great video!

Wow, this brings back a lot of memories. In college I had an internship that involved our lab building a couple dozen boxes for a distributed computing experiments (the AMD K-7s with the Nintendo cartridge looking packaging). The jumpers on the back of the hard drives always had to be checked first because, as I recall, they did not ship with the primary master jumpers set. So that was a pitfall for new students. I also recall even further back: In high school (mid 90s), buying larger WD drives on a discount from the local Fry's, on more than one occasion either I or a friend (I know I definitely had one) got a drive that just absolutely would not boot. Worked fine as a secondary drive, I used mine for years (I may still have it, now that I think about it), but even with the jumpers configured properly the bios wouldn't see it as a primary drive. Our friend group surmised that they had been salvaged from an array of some sort, wiped, and were being re-sold on the cheap (you'd always get them packaged in those silver static bags, and they were usually the cheapest drives they had for sale so we thought we were getting a deal). Some of those might be OK even if you can't get them to boot. Especially if they were salvaged from some other device. The only thing I miss about Win95 is the uncluttered UI. Did a new build for the first time in close to 20 years, and installing from-scratch Windows 11 I was really disappointed with all the clutter that I couldn't customize away.

This was so much more satisfying than loot boxes and roulette wheels. Can't wait for the part 2!

Ah yes the spin-up and clackity clack of the heads, can't ever erase that sound! One of the things I always do when firing up an old HDD (I've been replacing/upgrading HDDs in Macintosh systems SCSI IDE and SATA since 1996) is to warm it up nice and slowly, to help ease the lubrication of the old and often heat-cooked bearings. To avoid heat stress on other components, I don't use an oven or a heat gun (too vicious), but I either place it in the linen cupboard (next to the gentle warmth of the house hot water cylinder) or in a small room with a fan heater or hair dryer running nearby to blow a gentle stream of warm (not hot) air past the underside/motors until the metal temperature comes up nicely.