Micropolis Mustang 4540A hard drive sounds - The end of an era...

Here's the rare Micropolis Mustang 4540A drive that was in the big lot of 38 drives I got in April.
This drive kinda marks the end of an era, being the last drive series that Micropolis made before they want bankrupt in 1997. Originally being a manufacturer of high end drives in the 80s, they didn"t quite make it to the modern era, ending with these IDE offerings. They also made SCSI units using the same HDA design, that they called Stinger.
Sadly this drive is in insanely bad condition, with bad sector patterns across the entire drive (probably a bad head or electronic issue?) I still managed to get it to hold a FAT16 partition (thanks to the file system taking so little space), boot Windows 98 and even run SimCity 3000 despite its issues. While it's a bad exemple of one, it still allowed me to demonstrate how it sounds like. I've been wanting a Micropolis for a long time, so I'm glad it's not completely dead at least.

[@arnlol]

I messed up and put the wrong image at the end, oops... Here's the picture of the PCB: imgur.com/a/2pHcRmX

[@notsoseagatey]

glad I'm not the only one to notice that

[@ScottieNiven]

I remember ordering one of these drives probably back in 2009-2010 when I was new to ebay, sadly it never arrived and this is the first time I came across the drive since, and im finally happy to hear it

[@arnlol]

Oh that’s a bummer… I assume at that point in time drives like this (or any drives of a few GB) probably were a lot cheaper than they are now too. I’m glad I could make you hear how one sounds like even though this one is in awful condition.

[@ScottieNiven]

@@arnlol Yeah it was only around 5-10€ if I remember correctly so it wasnt a loss at the time!

[@aprilkolwey4779]

This drive seems like it would be a good candidate for that hdmotion patch I came up with on the Miniscribe 3180S video (change the byte at 0x3B60 from 0x42 to 0x47) - judging by the red line in speedsys this drive is executing seek commands fine, so it would most likely complete a run without error with that applied.

[@arnlol]

I have done that when you left that comment and kept a copy on my floppy that I called hdseek.exe. It does work, but because it is seek commands it runs a lot faster and sounds really unusual which I why I haven’t included that in a video so far. Yes this drive indeed runs the modified version without any trouble.

[@justsumguy2u]

I'm amazed you were able to get Win98 and Sim City to run without crashing on that ruined hard drive. Sim City wasn't happy about it though, the load times were really slow lol

[@arnlol]

I’ll be honest I have never really paid attention to how long SimCity usually takes, and it obviously varies with the drive I’m using. The machine is a Pentium 133 with 24MB of RAM, both of which being lower than the game "requirements", so it always takes quite some time to load. When I use my Pentium 3 (for drives >8GB) the games load so much faster. I think the drive did hit some of the bad sectors when loading though, but it didn’t prevent the game from running anyways. As crazy as it might sound, this isn’t the only drive with bad sector patterns covering the entire drive that I managed to make boot Windows, thanks to FAT16 taking very little space. FAT32 and NTFS take so much more space there’s no way to format a drive this bad at all with these.

[@KliaTech]

A rare micropolis. It's a shame that it has a lot of bad sectors.

[@arnlol]

Yes, I’m glad I got it, it’s an interesting drive but it’s a shame it’s in such a bad shape.

[@cdos9186]

These were a nice option from Micropolis at the time, but they just didn't make the mark in terms of reliability with them. I actually have one of these that is dead, a 4540A, if that helps to give in terms as to how reliable they are. They are nicely made and built drives, but they are certainly not reliable and Micropolis really seemed to struggle with making their drives last. It is a shame because I like them otherwise, just it is so difficult to get a working one.

[@arnlol]

Did you ever open yours? I'm curious how they look on the inside, but even if that one is super messed up I'd rather not open it

[@jjohnson71958]

is it pata connection? love to find one that is

[@arnlol]

Yes, the Mustang is IDE. The Stinger looks identical but is SCSI.

[@thegeforce6625]

Looking at the bad sector pattern, yeah most likely bad head electronics. If it only was a bad head, there probably would be more time before another bad sector would show up

[@arnlol]

I don’t really know, when I originally scanned the drive, it already had a lot of bad sectors but it wasn’t covering the entire drive yet, but after a write it covered the entire drive. I’m glad I still managed to make it hold a partition anyways thanks to FAT16 needing very little space to hold the file system.

[@notsoseagatey]

I saw this on discord lol, was gonna do a superthanks, sadly there's no option for that.

[@arnlol]

I dont know how superthanks work but anyways you should keep your money and get some more drives with it instead :)

[@notsoseagatey]

@@arnlol hahah can't really use the money outside of my phone, its google play credits i get for answering surveys so yea cant buy drives with it hahah

[@Phoenix_2924]

At least 98 still boots

[@arnlol]

Yes, thanks to FAT16 for taking so little space. It’s crazy to think this isn’t even the only drive with bad sector patterns like this that I managed to get booting an OS.

[@Mathmos252]

"It obviusly wont be a micropolis mustang"

[@arnlol]

Well it was obvious sarcasm x)

[@notsoseagatey]

@@arnlol with the emoji it was obviously sarcasm hahaha

[@TheDiskMaster]

Typical Micropolis quality