IBM DDYS-T18350 Hard drive sounds - 10k RPM with the dreaded glass platters…

[@Michael.Chapman]

The current Ultrastars are technically awesome. 11-platters, 22-heads in a 1-inch high 3.5 inch unit. I imagine you can’t do that without glass in a helium HDA. Great to see and hear your original Ultrastar from IBM Storage Division.

[@arnlol]

Yeah modern drives are crazy! Obviously I haven't paid much attention to them especially as many of them are very silent, but the technological advencements that allowed drives to be more than 20TB each is quite impressive.

[@thegeforce6625]

@@arnlol they're at 32tb now! (SMR though, but still)

[@nuherbleath461]

Christ it’s made that Seagate cheetah look like nothing

[@arnlol]

This one seems to be doing more caching which makes hdmotion run even faster and skip some parts, have some parts that sounds strange etc. This drive is from late 2000 while the Cheetah is early 1999, and at that point in time hard drives (like the rest of computing I guess) evolved really quickly.

[@notsoseagatey]

Great to see another working deathstar.

[@arnlol]

Well I hope it wont actually become a "deathstar", it's a pretty nice drive if only it wasn't unreliable

[@Mathmos252]

I like how this drive sounds! Is this drive unreliable like the deskstars?

[@arnlol]

@@Mathmos252 Considering the drive here was the only one that worked out of 3, and that the other two had similar damage as the one you could see inside 75GXP I assume they also aren’t reliable, although being server drives who knows how long those drives ran in servers before they failed

[@ScottieNiven]

I have 2 of this exact same drive and one is dead with the coating stripped from the glass platters, I have a video of it!

[@arnlol]

@@ScottieNiven Yeah I've seen that before, yours looks even worse than the one I had in that lot that also had part of the coating missing... It's a shame the IBMs of that time were super unreliable as they sound pretty nice

[@NelsonBigGunP200Fan]

​@@ScottieNivenI have seen that video! Amazing how easily a headcrash scraped the magnetic substrate away from the surface even at 10K RPM. Seen a seagate 15K cheetah do the same at work! Completely destroyed! Like how these drives sound similar to their cousin the 75GXP. And more similar to the 60 and 75GB versions , not so much the capacities below like the 45,30,20 and 15GB (those have a pronounced click before the heads do their test )

[@maxtornogood]

This is the UltraDeathStar, basically!

[@arnlol]

Pretty much that. I like that drive but not the fact it might eventually scrape off the coating of the platters

[@NelsonBigGunP200Fan]

Good condition for this Ultrastar! A shame the others have died due to headcrash! Definitly a fast drive for its time! Amazing it doesnt have any reallocated sectors.

[@arnlol]

It actually has 12 grown defects (which is what SCSI drives call reallocated sectors basically) but yeah it's doing good and is really fast, I like it but I keep in mind how the other two were so I hope this one wont end up like that in the future.

[@windowsfan95]

How is the data written to the glass? I would guess it’s a special type of glass?

[@arnlol]

The platters are coated with magnetic material (metal platters are coated with magnetic material as well). The issues with IBMs of that era is that the magnetic coating "easily" got scrapped off the platters by the heads.

[@MyComputerStudios_]

HDMotion sounds exactly like the 75GXP-based Ultrastar you have

[@arnlol]

This drive is from the same era, the seek test sounds quite similar as well so that's not too surprising. It's pretty much a 75GXP but 10k RPM.

[@arnlol]

Or well, more like it uses the same technology as the 75GXP and seems to have the same issues with coating flaking off the platters.

[@sandyred1140]

Got myself a ST-238 and it's own MFM card. The drive doesn't support autopark and I don't have any PCs with a slot for the card so it's going to have to wait.

[@arnlol]

Nice! Yeah you need pretty old stuff for that, a board with ISA and a BIOS that lets you enter manual parameters for hard drives and disable integrated IDE.

[@EvanPang-w4i]

I got a working 160gb ide ibm deskstar just sitting in a bin of old hard drives

[@arnlol]

That one would be a bit newer and after the era with reliability problems, though if it’s 160GB I would assume it’s an Hitachi as I think the last drive IBM did was the 180GXP, but I don’t think there’s 160GB variant of that.

[@SmoggyLambGG]

"Glass" platters "bad"?

[@arnlol]

@@SmoggyLambGG Back in that era IBM drives has an issue with the coating getting off of the glass platters. Obviously nowadays glass platters are just fine

[@adinnugroho6544]

This HDD made in Hungary 😅

[@arnlol]

Yeah IBM had a factory there. The two that were dead were made in Singapore

[@MilesProwerTailsFox]

Now make it play a simple beat and sell the audio for its use in rap songs lol