Kalok KL 320 hard drive sounds - Major damage, still boots!

[@ronny332]

Always crazy to see how heavy and huge these early arms were. The physics were the best enemy of these generations in terms of access times. Great video, thanks for sharing 🙂

[@arnlol]

Yes though I think the stepper motor itself was much more of a limiting factor. Some early voice coil drives had big/massive arms too but they were way faster than stepper drives.

[@greggv8]

15 (of 20) megabytes? Luxury! My first hard drive was a 5 megabyte MFM Tandon. After Installing DOS and all the software I had it was *half full*. Then I backed it up, onto 360K floppies. Never did that again...

[@arnlol]

I am too young to have used these back when they were new. The oldest things I used when I was a kid as IDE and a few hundred MBs. The smallest capacity drive in my collection is 10MB, I haven’t got any 5MB drive yet. But back when most people used 360K floppies I guess even a 5MB hard drive was a decent chunk of storage.

[@the_kombinator]

THe smallest drive I ever had was a 10 Mb, and that was fairly recently.

[@rrpiva]

Amazing that this thing is working without a head. That's a robust software protocol.

[@arnlol]

MFM drives are very basic, there’s no way for the computer to know how many heads and tracks the drive has, so you need to configure that in the BIOS. I set the value for heads in the BIOS to 3, so it won’t use the head that no longer exists, making the drive 15MB instead of 20, but allowing it to actually still be used.

[@MrEditor6000]

These relics still trying to work is so cool. Shows how far we've come with technology.

[@arnlol]

Yeah, hard drives have evolved a lot since the late 80s. There’s high capacity drives nowadays that store more than one million times more than this drive did (20MB then to drives larger than 20TB now). Modern drives definitely wouldn’t even think of working in such shape, but at the same time, damaging a modern drive is also not as easy as before with parking ramps etc to make them less likely to be damaged by handling.

[@robertgordon103]

​​@@arnlolwow I thought they had stopped making them with SSDs being more popular and the factory lines that make them having closed down. They are still being made brand new?

[@arnlol]

@@robertgordon103 Yes hard drives are still being made, the largest being over 20TB, but they are still making drives as "small" as 1TB new

[@robertgordon103]

​@@arnlol Cool! Could these new drives still be used in older laptops or computers with a SATA to IDE converter and a small enough partition? I mean Windows 3.1/95/98/XP era laptops/computers.

[@arnlol]

@@robertgordon103 I have never tried but I assume it would probably work? Of course most old OSes wouldn’t be able to use so much space.

[@Mathmos252]

Drive:dead , destroyed, damaged Arnold:shakes the drive Drive:comes back to life

[@arnlol]

Nah actually shaking it with the broken off head lose inside might have made it worse (that lose head could totally add extra damage to the platters) Now me spinning that pivot screw allowing it to initialize… Yeah that did happen, don’t ask me why.

[@Mathmos252]

@@arnlol why?

[@arnlol]

@@Mathmos252I see what you did there x) My guess would be it changed slightly how the heads are aligned and that allowed the heads to pick up the embedded track 0 signal again.

[@Mathmos252]

and what magical powers made that happen...?@@arnlol

[@arnlol]

@@Mathmos252 I don’t know x)

[@Stoney3K]

I'm not surprised that the first half of those cylinders are a mess with all that damage. The outside was basically destroyed but the inside looked fine.

[@arnlol]

Yeah, sadly it wasn’t just the top head/surface that was destroyed, there’s damage on the other ones too, but yeah the closer to the spindle the better it gets.

[@Volvotech740]

3:42 i absolutely love that sound

[@arnlol]

Yeah the seeking of Kaloks just sounds amazing. Even if it’s in such a bad shape I’m glad I could get it going

[@skittlesthehusky1225]

im still quite new to the hard drive world but mfm drives seem to be quite resilient in the most horrific conditions. how interesting!

[@Jones5121]

i like how it uses different speeds for the stepper motor depending on how far it's gotta move the heads

[@arnlol]

Yeah later stepper drives did that to try and get better seek times. It makes different sounds depending on how far it needs to seek, that’s pretty neat

[@justinpatterson5291]

Don't let Venjent see this. He'll grace us with another mad beat.

[@arnlol]

I didn’t know that, I took a look, I guess it’s a person that makes music from random sounds, that’s pretty cool. I have had people tell me they thought a drive sounded like music/had a cool beat etc multiple times before. I wonder what an actual attempt to make proper music from HDD sounds would be like (I definitely don’t have the skills to even think of trying that myself x))

[@matthewsvideos8235]

I have the KL 330 that is the RLL variant of your drive. Still fully operational and outlasted a Kyocera drive.

[@arnlol]

Well that one has seen better days, but I don't think they were as bad as people want you to think

[@stevepine3568]

This HDD: If the whole house collapses on it, it still works. My 2TB Seagate BarraCuda: Neighbours sneezes, read/write error. I kick the desk accidentally while sitting down, need to buy new HDD.

[@arnlol]

Modern hard drives have a way higher density, and if physical damage does happen to them, it would cause a lot of bad sectors and/or destroy the heads (which are way more fragile than heads in such a old drive). MFM drives like this don’t really care about damage, it’ll just be a bunch of bad sectors but the drive doesn’t really care

[@TheDiskMaster]

You probably should have uploaded this before the short to keep the surprise a secret

[@arnlol]

That’s true, it’s just clips of opened drives are nice to make shorts of, and shorts are just a cut the recording to less than 1 min using the KZbin app, and post that I didn’t even really think of what the full video would be when I posted them.

[@zsombor_99]

What a survivor!! 😮

[@arnlol]

Have any kind of damage on anything just a few years newer and that would definitely not work at all… That’s the power of MFM, they were simple enough to not even care if they are missing a head as long as you don’t try to read/write on said missing head.

[@zsombor_99]

​@@arnlol Fascinating!

[@cdos9186]

Shame about the top head being like that and crashed, at least you still have three heads to use! You really know how to get drives going again wow! I am jealous you keep finding cheap Kalok drives : ))

[@arnlol]

You want to know a funny thing? I found another one, a KL-343 for 19€ but that doesn’t spin up (probably stiction) and doesn’t ship to France. I might ask then if they would consider eventually, though I’m not really planning to get that currently.

[@cdos9186]

@@arnlol What!! Wow that is a good price! Maybe that one could also have a bad PCB but stiction does seem more likely indeed. You should probably pick that up because you can never have enough Kalok drives can you? I have zero still : ((

[@arnlol]

@@cdos9186 I’ll see, maybe it would be in better shape than the one I already have, but I don’t know if the seller would agree to ship to France or not and how much would the shipping be… Maybe I’ll ask them

[@cdos9186]

@@arnlol Good idea and good luck! Why do you have all the Kalok drives over there for good prices...

[@maxtornogood]

Nice work even making this thing work!

[@arnlol]

That’s MFM drives, as long as they initialize they will take commands… And if it’s missing the last head, you can tell the BIOS the drive is a 3 heads drive and nothing will question that. Now managing to make it initialize was pure luck just like other times where I somehow managed to make a drive work again.

[@38911bytefree]

What a Warrior, put a hell of a fight. I was a bit over interested LOL on HDD by the early 2000, there was a blog with several vintage drives, Kalok were mentioned for its famous noises. Also read about brands most people wont ever recognize. Many didnt make it pass end 80 or early 90s. For late mid 90s, I would say based on small number of samples, MAXTOR / QUATUM held way better than, WD CAVIARS. At least to me. I found caviar aluminium seal gets damaged during installation of it will stop making a good seal. Quatums of the sameperiod lookes more advance, less noise, less power hungry and to me, faster. At least for 100MB to 4G range.

[@arnlol]

Yeah in the 80s there was a LOT of brands, and most people haven’t heard of most of them. By the early to mid 90s most of them were dead. I think the last "small" manufacturer attempt was ExcelStor in the early to mid 2000s. I’m not sure if that applied to these older MFM ones, but the IDE Kalok drives were supposedly super unreliable. I have two working KL-3100, one of which has bad sectors, and they sure sound amazing. I’m glad I got this one to do stuff even in such a sad state, as it still sounds amazing. I honestly don’t know which drives of the 90s are better or worse than others, and I feel like people had different experiences with them, I think for every brand there will be people that could swear they were amazing and others that they were awful. The original Quantum fireball were meant to be high end drives and they definitely were quite fast for the time.

[@38911bytefree]

@@arnlol I got 10 0r 15 retro drives from the period. All used, as daily drives at their time. Seagates up to 3G barey work and so Caviars. Take into account this 15 drives are the %100 good no bad sectors. I have trashed like 4 times or more drives just to get to this point. Othe brand that does good is fujitsu. I even had a bigfoot in PERFECT condition). It was installed ina pc at a production line. Bigfoot are not know for their rleiability. My guess is, it spents most of its life as the backup drive since the factory had all their pcs with cloned drives, one connected and the other in reserve. I gave the bigfoot to a friend collector, to build a good 90s computer. I love the more clunky one like in the 80, but they are expensive and hard to get specially with no surface issues. The oldest I got was a clunku 40MB quantum, full heigh but on 3 1/2. What a brick.

[@arnlol]

@@38911bytefreeah well Im definitely not that picky for my collection, I don’t care if drives have bad sectors (even a lot of them) as long as I can manage to make them boot an OS. Probably about half of my collection have varying levels bad sectors/issues (From a single reallocated sector to drives completely filled with bads/with large ares totally unusable). Even like that, I’ve disassembled soooo many drives that were totally dead… I wouldn’t be surprised if I got over 100 dead drives that I disassembled at this point.

[@Noon1263]

jesus, what is that harddrive made out of? Tungston? looks fully armoued up readyt for a fight and everything!

[@arnlol]

Ahah no I don’t think so. I don’t actually know what material it is, but a small magnet doesn’t stick to it.

[@chimerahitman]

Back then they were expensive, I guess they used good quality materials to make up for it? Just a guess

[@PixelBrushArt]

Either some kinda Alloy or just high quality Aluminium

[@arnlol]

@@PixelBrushArtI have no idea, but it doesn’t look the same as say a Quantum ProDrive (which definitely uses aluminum)

[@Aeduo]

Never heard of this brand of hard drive.

[@arnlol]

Kalok is a brand that died in the early 90s. I think the KL-320 might have been their first drive, which is kind of a clone of the Kyocera KC-20B. They continued to make drives with a similar design, still using a stepper motor into the IDE era up to 120MB with 3 platters. These newer ones are known for being supposedly super unreliable. I have two of the later ones, though the ones I have are the 100MB model, and they sound absolutely amazing! What’s interesting is they also made a removable hard drive cartridge system that used thin drives with voice coils, which ended up being the base that JTS used for their drives (JTS possibly being a brand you didn’t know of as well I guess)

[@Aeduo]

@@arnlol that is true I don't. I do know of Kyocera but not as a brand of hard drives.

[@Documenting_Life_8619]

Damn the size of that platter is size of vinyl disc almost 😅

[@arnlol]

I put my phone really close to the drive which maybe gave you this feeling, but no it is much smaller than that. The drive is half height 3.5', so uses the same size platters as any modern desktop drive. The platters are closer in size to a CD than they would be to a vinyl (but even a CD is bigger than 3.5' drives platters)

[@jjohnson71958]

whats the name of the hdd softwre u used

[@jjohnson71958]

@@Mathmos252 can you give me the software links for both programs please

[@arnlol]

Which one? When I had the drive opened at the start and made it seek, it was with HDAT. Then after low level format, the tool to scan the surface was Spinrite II. The two programs I used to make it seek after, which are the same I use in the other videos is HDMotion and Speedsys.

[@jjohnson71958]

@@arnlolboth

[@ebanl9531]

3:54 Mr. Krabs is a robot!

[@JankPods0201]

That's actually funny, NGL!

[@jamberrytastic]

insert but it refused meme here

[@arnlol]

Ahah what’s funny is I have been doing some multiworld randomizers with other people and I have been playing undertale in those, so I sure get that reference. I don’t think it could die and "refuse"/revive multiple times though x)

[@Skyplier]

If im not wrong you are french right? Car linstallation windows que tu utilise est en francais

[@arnlol]

Oui je suis Français (mais je fais les textes en Anglais dans les vidéos parce qu’il y a beaucoup plus de personnes anglophones qui les regardent)

[@Stay_alert]

COLLECTION UPDATE!!! IT'S BEEN A YEAR!!!

[@arnlol]

Yes it has but I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve been waiting for a special milestone that I’m close to before doing a new one. Reaching 300 drives. Once I reach 300 drives hopefully pretty soon I’ll take the time to make a new one :)

[@Stay_alert]

@@arnlol O K

[@Mathmos252]

what apllication do you use to low level format?

[@arnlol]

Depends, most of the time I use speedstor, but I can also use HDAT, SGATFMT4 etc... It shouldn't really matter which LLF tool you use

[@Mathmos252]

@@arnlol thanks, also , what do the jumpers mean (on the bottom of the PBC in mfm drives) and how should i set up my Mfm card?

[@arnlol]

@@Mathmos252 Well you should look up your drive to know, most of them should be for drive select though (so should be set to drive 0 if your cable is straight through, and 1 if your cable has a twist (and the drive is plugged after the twist). As for the card they are all different… But the one thing you should absolutely do is disable the onboard IDE on the motherboard or it’s never going to work.

[@SmoggyLambGG]

# # # 0a Bad secctor detected # 0a Bad secctor detected # 04 Sector not found

[@arnlol]

Considering how damaged it is, HDMotion actually went pretty well. What’s nice on MFM drives is if the sector is marked bad on the low level format it will display that "bad sector detected" thing but it won’t freeze like it does when it is an uncorrectable read error.

[@peachy7776]

7:12 starts sounding like engines lmao

[@stefanreck7908]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/bKeafqV5e7CFobM is where she fires. Idles just fine too... ;-)

[@arnlol]

You aren’t the first and probably won’t be the last saying that, I guess it’s just the rhythm that HDMotion accesses the sectors that makes people think of car engines, cause of course cars don’t make high pitched stepper motor sounds x)

[@peachy7776]

hehe ye the rythm indeed

[@Stay_alert]

I made a t-shirt design for ya! do you have an email can send the pictures to?

[@the_kombinator]

Kalok drives were garbage the minute they left the plant. You'd readily find a working HardCard before one of these that worked.

[@arnlol]

Yeah they are regarded as very unreliable drives. I have one of the later IDE ones that's fully working even though it sounds nasty when it spins down. I am not convinced that nowadays Kaloks are less likely to work than HardCards though, as the HardCards are failing due to a melting rubber bumper, and that basically affects all of them.

[@the_kombinator]

@@arnlol In 25 years in IT (mid 90s to technically now, although I hardly deal with bulk hardware) I have never, ever, held a working HardCard in my hands. I did see one recently at a friends house and she told me that it does work, which to me is a small miracle ;)

[@arnlol]

@@the_kombinator interesting, I wouldn’t have thought the HardCard were already having issues back in the 90s

[@the_kombinator]

@@arnlol Oh yes, I vaguely recall a few that had come in for data scraping. Two (or three?) customers balked at the price and cut their losses, one guy had us mail it to a recovery lab and I recall the bill being enough to buy a whole Pentium 133 multimedia system (in mid 1996) - I removed the drive from the card to prep it, and double boxed it. He got his data back but was furious about the cost and bought a tape backup from us, as well as a more modern 486 (it was for an industrial application, originally in a 286 IIRC) which I also recall because I speced one out for him. Always back up!

[@elden4267]

France ou quebec ?

[@arnlol]

France. D’ailleurs le décalage horaire pour parler aux autres collectionneurs sur discord qui sont eux au USA ce n’est pas très pratique x)

[@dinowars0078]

@@arnlol tout a fait comprenable, même si je ne collectionne pas, j'ai un disque dur 20gb wd caviar 200 EIDE que j'éssaie de trouver une utilistion pour très difficile, je l'utilise comme disque dur externe mais même encore je l'utilise pas très souvent j'en ait un autre mais euhh il est mort par un short sur le board par une erreur stupide de ma part, mais même encore il marchait de peur, j'avait réussi a faire runné hddregenerator dessus mais vers la fin il a décider de faire un super bon sons qui indiquait que le disque dur n'étaits tout a fait pas en train de gruger son propre plateau hmmm c'étaits génial. Anyways le disque dur de 20gb qui marche a uniquement 586jours d'utilisation dessus il a été fait dans les année 2001 quasiment neuf! et si sa paraissaient pas je vient pas de france. j'peut te laisser deviner de où!

[@arnlol]

@@dinowars0078 J’en ai un de Caviar de 20Go WD200 mais il a un grand nombre de secteurs défectueux. Malheureusement les disques avec des secteurs défectueux sont assez communs, mais bon on peux quand même les faire fonctionner et écouter les sons qu’ils font. Avec plus de 500 jours je ne dirais pas qu’il est neuf, mais par contre c’est tout à fait possible qu’il fonctionne parfaitement (heureusement d’ailleurs). Je supposes que tu est au Canada/Quebec surtout avec la question d’origine et aussi les phrases tournées un peu différemment par rapport à nous :)

[@dinowars0078]

@@arnlol Tu a bien deviner, et oui il fonctionne parfaitement sa valeur smart est 100% et selon mes souvenir hdsentinel me disait que la condition du disque était parfaite/excellente il a peut de démarrage/arrêt dessus ce qui m'empêche de faire grand choses dessus est sa capacité vraiment limité pour avoir une utilisation aujourd'hui toujours bon pour vidéo photo etc mais pas grand chose d'autres. Je sait pas pourquoi mais j'adore les vieux disque durs écran n'importe qui qui est vieux je cherche toujours a rendre quelque chose de vieux et non fonctionelle et considérer comme inutile et les rendres utiles, ce qui est plate ces que les disque durs, je ne peut pas les arrenger, mais j'aime bien les entendre en fonction parfaitement comme il était originalement conçu pour fonctioner dans les année ou il était considérer comme nouveau! désavantage de la france et du canada le timezone n'est pas très utile et c'est sûr que des vieux disque dur sont facilement trouvable avec des secteur défectueux (ce qui est un peu désolent mais faut faire avec jusqu'a temps ou ils finissent tous par mourir un moment donné)!