NEC D3146H Hard drive sounds & inside view

A nice motor actuated NEC, which was shipped with innadequate protection and ripped its own top head off the first time I spun it up.
Sadly the broken off head isn't the only issue this drive has, the other surfaces are also quite damaged, and the positionning is also having a big problem, like I can LLF the drive and it will seemingly work fine, then suddenly a lot of sectors will become IDNF etc... Despite the issues I managed to have it work good enough to make this video.

[@mima85]

0:04 - OUCH! That's definitely a noise you DON'T want to hear from an hard drive. In the past I had 2 of those drives, due to improper storage by me one ended having the heads stuck to the platters very hard, and when I tried to free the disk of course I ripped off the heads. As for the other one, when I powered it on for the first time when I found it, the stepper slammed repeatedly back and forth the head stack against the arm stops so hard that caused an extensive head crash all over the surfaces of all the platters. Bad controller. Some time after I found the IDE version of this drive for cheap on eBay and I snagged it immediately. It's in perfect condition, no bad sectors at all, and sometimes I take it off its box and give it a run to prevent it ending like my first NEC. That drive is special: it came from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Every time I grab the box I wonder if the person that wrote his and my address on the box is still alive, it's a strange and quite eerie feeling. On the drive there's still the original DOS installation, with some very old russian DOS games, a copy of Volkov Commander and some other stuff. That's a very special item I have in my collection.

[@arnlol]

Ouch stiction sucks… This one obviously didn’t have stiction as it started up just fine, my assumption is the platter got damaged in shipping and the head caught on that damage which caused it to be ripped off, but that could be wrong obviously. I didn’t know motor actuated NECs existed with the IDE interface, I thought they were all MFM. That’s a nice drive you have. It must be quite a strange feeling to think about the person that sold you that drive…

[@mima85]

@@arnlol Oh yeah, indeed it is. Anyway your theory about your drive most probably is right.

[@XLGaming]

I really like the seek sounds of this drive. It sounds different than most steppers I've heard.

[@arnlol]

Yeah it sounds quite nice. As far as I understand, it actually isn't a stepper motor, but a DC motor with optical servo which might be why it sounds different.

[@TheDiskMaster]

That's because this is an optical servo, not a stepper

[@bigbluebananabread]

You certainly did well getting what you could out of it at the very least! Of course it's a massive bummer how this one turned out though. Very interesting drives.

[@arnlol]

Yeah I guess it could have been even worse, at least I managed to record it boot and run the usual hdmotion and speedsys.

[@DenisusaS]

Arnold if you are looking at this comment do a full format on the wd red 4tb from a year ago.That should fix all pending sectors.Worked with my drives!

[@arnlol]

I have done a full write on it in the past but the pendings came back. But since then it's got way way worse with a TON of bad sectors so I have removed it from use months ago.

[@notsoseagatey]

Looks really nice inside tbh, also sounds quite interesting too. Shame that it had problems, hopefully it's fine

[@arnlol]

Yeah, not my first drive with major issues I guess

[@notsoseagatey]

@@arnlol your kalok kl 320, the broken band RO0652, the 384R is just some examples I guess

[@TheDiskMaster]

Hey at least it works better than my D3126H.

[@arnlol]

Well that's actually true it doesn't make a strange high pitched sound at least. Wonder what causes that drive of yours to sound like that

[@Mathmos252]

oh ma gud 0:04

[@notsoseagatey]

bro got the shock of his life

[@arnlol]

That was certainly unexpected eh

[@notsoseagatey]

@@arnlol true just like when the rodime caps blew up xd

[@MyComputerStudios_]

Well try getting some replacement platters in there, maybe that may work?

[@arnlol]

I'm not sure how to unload the heads and I don't think that would improve the positionning problem so I don't think it's worth trying that.

[@Mathmos252]

@@arnlol to unload i think you need to remove those 2 screws on the back of the actuator (the one that goes around the stepper motor) and then remove that big screw on top of the bearing. dont do that tho

[@bobjoe2827]

@@Mathmos252 Close, you remove the two back screws, then the screws on the capstan of the stepper motor and slide the band off and capstan off as one assembly (that is what I have done when servicing one of these). The inner bumper stop has to be removed carefully (it is pressed in, and the old rubber will be fragile), then you should be able to space and unload the heads. The real problem comes with the drive's use of wedge servo on the platters (many late steppers do this actually) which is the cause of this drive's positioning problems (I was just swapping out the spindle motor on mine, so I reused the original platters without messing with the servo).

[@romania5199]

how do i run HDMonitor?

[@arnlol]

hdmotion you mean? You need to add it into a DOS floppy disk then run hdmotion 0x80 on the command prompt (for the first drive, 0x81 for the second etc)

[@notsoseagatey]

@@arnlol you can run it off the HD too