The 3053 had an awesomely refined sound generated by its voice coil head actuator. They were fabulous drives that could take an RLL format out to 60 MB capacity.

i found an untested one on ebay for 28 euros ( free shipping ) it may be the next drive i'm buying ;)

i had a ~30MB Tulin TL340 in my first computer. It died of a pretty nasty head crash a while ago and I recycled it last week. RIP to a real one, slow and loud but still loved

Mine still working fine actually

ACT / Apricot Computers were assembled not far from Rodime in Scotland, and included the 3.5 inch 10 and 20 Mb hard drives in their XI models from 1984.

I learned way back when that giving a good beating to those drives would make them skip the HDMotion errors.

that drive is not happy one bit. how long it took to detect parameters, to the HDMotion Errors. it's just begging for the sweet release of death.

It was stuck for just over a minute after 3:48 trying to obtain the parameters. HDMotion doesn't paint a pretty picture either. Barely works well enough for a demo.

spindle a bit loud to hear stepper moves, but atleast it sounds nice enough

Never knew this existed! So, this is an ST-225 technically?

The poor bearings in that drive are screaming for some lubrication too

That's so weird to me because I grew up in a little town in Oregon called LaPine

Thank you, nice asmr

I recently fell into the similarly autistic rabbit hole of server fans, and my computer went from silent to REEEEEE. I can’t fall down another rabbit hole lmao.

Lapine had an interesting relationship with Kyocera as they were contracted by Lapine to manufacture their hard drive designs and were later sued by Lapine for using their designs on their own drives without permission. Capacitors are starting to become a problem on a lot of vintage hard drives, however early 3.5" hard drives seem to be the most problematic (especially if they are of Japanese origin for some reason).

Why do most drives you test nowadays keep giving errors in the first program and HDmotion?

3:42 is oddly musical to me haha

awesome sounding seektest

suprisingly quiet

Mine is the same way (the top platter is hosed), but it works fine as a 10 Meg drive. One of these days I will get around to trying a platter swap on that drive.

Glad I am not the only one having trouble with this model. I have two of these and I got one working, but the second one needs help. Outlasted by Kalok KL330 from about the same time.

Glad this 'worked' well enough for a demo but the head crash is very apparent!

I've mentioned this elsewhere before, but I can't remember if you've seen it or not - for drives that are pretty much trashed like this one, if you change the byte at 0x3B60 in hdmotion from 0x42 to 0x47, it will issue seek commands instead of read commands. On a working drive it will tend to sound a bit faster than normal since you're not waiting on rotational latency, but on mostly-dead drives like this one you can usually get them to seek like that without giving a ton of errors and taking forever.

i think this drive got head crash

Ouch! I hear a head crash big time :(

Head crash?

i wonder how well this drive would do if it was formatted with MFM encoding.

morse code??? 2:39

OMG HARD DRIVE HAS BEARINGS ARE WORN

Those are definately some worn bearings

Do Not Skip This Bad Drives!

interesting video! I have two ST-412 drives. Both in working condition. But only one sounds fine, the other one is loud (sometimes and sometimes the sound changes and it becomes more quiet. With some weird kinda spring noises sometimes. That one was also stuck. this evening I was trying it for the first time. At first the drive didnt do anything, but after moving the motor it started working. it passed the diagnostics check from IBM without errors. I hope the sound will become better over time and isnt indicating anything bad 😅.

yay, Kalok drive is here

oh man those bearings are *worn*

This one seems to be a bit rougher than the one I have as a secondary in my XT computer.

Is that one of the ones with metal strips wrapped around the stepper shaft for the push-pull?

Just some days ago I found this one for about 30 euros including shipping on eBay. For the same price the same seller has a Maxtor 7120AT. They were both in perfect functional condition (no bad sectors) and ahestetically they were in a very good state too, no major scratches, dings or corrosion on them. Knowing the insane prices these hard drives go nowadays on eBay I immediately snagged both of them, it was a no brainer really.

I like the chug chug chug chug it makes while it loaded Windows 95

I think it's 3050rpm drive rather than 3600rpm but I might be wrong.

i Did Order An SCSI Drives To Work

SOUNDS LIKE ST 251 AND ST 277R

is drive okay? i feel like heads 2 and 4 feel bad

The Seagate ST-100 (stepper motor) drives seem to experience stiction in their ST-506/412 interface far more often than in their ATA/SCSI interface. I have always thought that this is the case due to their use on hard cards, which bakes them to death causing oil from the bearings to settle on the platters leading to stiction. If the heads are intact a head cleaning and platter swap would resolve it's stiction issues, however these drives are a massive pain to work on (mostly due to the size, but also the fact that you have to remove the stepper bands to unload the heads). Despite the difference in geometry a board swap between this drive and the far more common 157A works fine after a LLF (I believe Seagate uses the inner tracks to store drive firmware on the ST-157A that is not needed for the ST-157R).

This drive seems a lot more tired than my ST-157A.

The seek test sure is different that the IDE and SCSI variants. Is head 2 dead/ripped off maybe?

Very cool! Huge shame about the corrosion, it's quite the interesting unit.

ow, that HDAT test feels bad

0:16 This drive has the coolest-sounding power-on seek test I've ever heard on a hard drive. Very science-fictiony.

The errors on HDMotion seem more like actual issues with the drive rather than controller timeout errors. After all, the tract-to-track times are still better (18ms) than on many Microscience drives (32ms), and your Microscience HH-725s don't struggle through HDMotion like this Miniscribe 3012 does. Does your particluar drive have other issues besides the (normal) ultra-slow seek times?

If this drive came from who I think it came from (a certain eBay seller as part of a lot of drives) it's worth noting that nearly all drives sold by them either work or are destroyed beyond repair unfortunately. It is still however a nice drive to have in one's possession.