NEW 20 MB Seagate ST225N SCSI Hard Disk Drive, Unpacking, Installing and Testing / Review

[@lazibayer]

Don't forget to register your drive online to claim full manufacturer's warranty from Seagate.

[@simontay4851]

haha! Yeah, right. There was no online in those days.

[@ducksonplays4190]

@@simontay4851 technically there was but it was primitive and few used it

Haha joke

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

Mail in your warranty materials. With paid postage already attached.

[@auke1031]

Please dial the Seagate BBS at (toll-free number) to register your new product instantly! (2400Baud,N,8,1 ANSI )

[@elementbr]

"the smell, very very special". I love the smell of old electronics. Excellent new intro. :)

[@spitefulwar]

Now I do feel only half weird. Thanks for this post.

[@ozmobozo]

There's a distinct smell of old OEM computer cases. I miss that a lot...

[@gustavrsh]

No hiss...

[@szabolcsmate5254]

Probably poisonous but still!

[@mjhden]

The sound of that drive starting up brought back so many memories.

[@CPUGalaxy]

The original software which was in the original partition you can download in the description 😉

[@Vapefly0815]

New subscriber here, love your content so far! If I may ask, where in Austria are you from? I'd put you around Salzburg, Upper or lower Austria, judging by your accent.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thanks for subscribing. ☺️. I am from Kärnten 🇦🇹

[@Vapefly0815]

@@CPUGalaxy Ahh, greetings from Oberösterreich! :)

[@CPUGalaxy]

👍🏻

[@red__guy]

Ahhh Austria... So you won't read us german bedtime stories with that smooth voice... :( (the bedtime stories were kids die)

[@Hal9526]

This brings back memories, for sure. I bought my first hard drive (a Seagate ST-138R) in 1988. I purchased it from Hard Drives International, from an ad in Computer Shopper. Just about all of the companies advertising in that magazine -- and there were hundreds -- are as dead as the dodo now.

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

Thanks for putting the microphone by the drive, the sounds brought back floods of nostalgia! My first IBM compatible was a 286 machine with an EGA display, 640kb of RAM and a 30MB Seagate RLL drive installed with Achter DOS, it looked a lot like this ST225 so I imagine it was essentially the same mechanism. The sound of it starting up is very distinctive! A couple of years later I upgraded the motherboard to a 386 one and in the process I somehow damaged the drive or the RLL controller and it never worked again... Fortunately I had everything of importance backed up to floppy disks but I could only afford to buy a 20Mb "hard card" to replace the drive at the time! About a year later I upgraded that to a new-fangled 3.5" Western Digital (caviar?) IDE drive with an size of 170Mb which at the time seemed impossibly huge! The hard card remained installed as a backup device, a job it served at for many years until I bought a CD writer.

[@crusader2.0_loading89]

Love that sound! So many memories. Debug g=C800:5....getting the right interleave to get that extra few KB per second. Aaahhh...those were the days!

[@0blivioniox864]

Ahh ST225 - My first hard drive... 😊 I still remember ordering mine by phone from a Computer Shopper magazine. Those Seagate's sure were a special combination of expensive and unreliable. Some things never change.

[@Ragnar8504]

I thought they were quite reliable but I only started messing around with those in the second half of the 90s so maybe the lemons had already weeded themselves out by the time the drives were 8 to 10 years old. My experience with Seagate drive that were new at that time definitely line up with yours though! There's even a German joke about Seagate drives that might have been invented before I did but I haven't heard it from anyone else. "Entweder Seagate oder Seagate nicht!" - either it works or it doesn't. It's a pun on the sound of "Seagate", which is kind of similar to "sie geht" (literally "she walks" but often used as "it works", like in French, German nouns have genders and hard drives are feminine).

[@TheRailroad99]

@@Ragnar8504 den Spruch kannte ich noch nicht! Werde ich mir merken :D (didn't knew this one - gonna remember it !)

[@CTSFanSam]

Ahh Computer Shopper magazine. More like a phone book. I bet the post office hated CS mailing day. Lots of mom and pop builders back then. Sure was a different computer world back then.

[@nexxusty]

Seagate drives have always been terrible. Not surprising.

[@davidverbeek4849]

the 2.5 inch Seagate drives are unreliable sure, but I have only ever had 1 3.5 inch go bad on me. it was from a pvr box and had 8 year of spin time on it. my old server has 6 Seagate 10k scsi 320 u drives it it from 2004 and all still test good i have also modded the server for sata and have been using 4 tb skyhawks for almost a year, I also have in my new desktop a 2tb drive with over 500 days on also with no issues, that is also not mentioning the drives in my xp desktop, my sony ps2 fat and my old p1 mmx233, plus my box of old seagate ide drives that all still work. seagate might have some problems but they can make good desktop drives

[@lilshawn2]

Boy, this video brought back some memories! old stepper actuated MFM drives...dot matrix "tractor feed" paper... having to run a program to change data in the BIOS info... having to MANUALLY enter the head/cyl/sector info...parking drives before you shutdown. man, those were the days. Thanks for this video!

[@Ragnar8504]

I've got an old NEC 20 MB drive that has a visible exposed stepper! Now that's crazy!

[@MrHBSoftware]

vintage needle printers and tractor feed paper are still widely used commercially in factories and businesses...they are VERY reliable and the ink ribbons are very very cheap

[@SeanBZA]

I also had a luggable with a ST225 drive, which had no need to park, as the drive controller was written so that every time the heads were moved to a track, and after a half second of inactivity, the drive would automatically park them again. Did mean that it spent a lot of the time waiting for the head stack to get to a track and then do the sector work, probably a 50% speed penalty on the drive access, especially with lots of small file work, as the 80186 processor it used was less than speedy, though it did come with the whole 640k of memory soldered to the main board. Got it very cheap, as it was extremely obsolete, and finally the screen finished off dying, as the EL backlight faded away. But was able to run it a long time, and even upgraded it to MSDOS 5.0 as well, though there were not many things around that would run fast on it.

[@modernandretrogaming]

I used with my 286 years ago MFM version of that harddrive, I still remember sound of that hdd.

[@Ragnar8504]

@German Retro Guy Oh yeah, late-90s and early-2000s 3.5" Quantums are insanely annoying! My Power Mac G3 266 Desktop originally had a 4.3 GB Fireball AT that I later replaced with a 10 GB, incredibly noisy drives! The earlier ProDrives weren't nearly as annoying. The worst batch were the 2.5" GoDrives though - they died on me like flies in the early 2000s and now out of the six or so I had only two are still working. Of course 2.5" SCSI drives are unobtainium now. My absolute favourite HDD sound is a 5 1/4" full-height drive with a whopping 600 MBs, can't remember the manufacturer right now. It takes more than twice as long to spin up as this one!

[@ericnelson4540]

I've always enjoyed the sound of the st-255. Easy sound effect that has been used in many movies.

[@robertcox5948]

My first HDD was a 52MB Seagate SCSI on an ST01 controller. Nice video, brings back memories!

[@robertcox5948]

@@Danielrs3 It has been 30 years, but that number sounds right.

[@totoliciu]

Great review! I liked very much when you said "Now the heads are getting crazy" when the test was running :))

[@RB9522]

You bring back good memories, I think. Thanks for your hard work to bring these videos to us!

[@CPUGalaxy]

thank you! Its my passion an I love the good old times. I am happy to bring back good memories for my viewers. And those are good memories for me as well. Thanks for your comment. Cheers, Peter

[@shadowflash705]

11 years old me getting the very first hard disk, super expensive birthday gift at the time. That brings memories. And now I'm typing this message on the phone with 256Gb of internal storage and 1Tb microSD that costs a lot less than 40Mb HDD back then.

[@bitrot42]

Great video! I had no idea there was a SCSI version of the ST-225. The regular '225 is probably the worst hard drive I've ever encountered. If it didn't sieze up altogether due to "stiction", it would develop read errors when the alignment drifted. Back in the day, I used to do "data recovery" by holding it it one hand, whacking the side while turning on the power to get it spinning, and then twisting the frame in various ways to nudge the alignment until all the files could be copied. Yes, this is terrible, but I made a lot of people very happy this way.

[@simontay4851]

Im surprised that even worked at all. There couldn't be a more bodgy way.

[@bitrot42]

@@simontay4851 These drives were not precision instruments... There was actually a program called SpinRite you could use to periodically re-write the entire contents, so the data would remain readable as the alignment drifted. I discovered the "twist" trick by accident when a drive with read errors worked much better after I unbolted it from the PC to copy it to another machine. It showed that these drives were much more sensitive to tension on the frame than I would have expected. It was a great as a last-ditch effort to pull data from a drive before scrapping it. (Actually, if you did a low-level format and ran SpinRite periodically, the drives were still usable!)

[@AI_Image_Master]

Yet probably the most used drive at the time. I worked for a company in the 80's that put together clones. Remember that term. Used a lot of this drive and the 40MB version in our "AT" computers. Don't remember the code # of that drive.

[@rallyscoot]

20 / 30 / 40 and 84 MB.

[@jeffm2787]

I always ran my MFM drives with RLL controllers to get the extra space.

[@pederb82]

That sound brings back so many good memories of my childhood playing Port of Calls, Civilization 1, railroad Tycoon etc on my 12,5 MHz 80286 4MB ram, 42MB hard drive, 256 color VGA graphics and Sound Blaster Pro equipped Sanyo. Don’t dare to even imagine what my parents paid for it.

[@loughkb]

I installed so many of those, back when I worked at a computer store in the mid 1980s. Good times.

[@fred6464]

I built my first PC in the late 1980s with a Seagate 20MB SCSI drive and I think it was this exact model. I also used the ST01 adapter then later moved up to an Adaptec controller. My motherboard had an AMI BIOS, actually the motherboard itself was made my AMI and I used a 20 MHz 386, snapping in the 64k cache RAM DIP chips and the 4 MB RAM was fun back then. Oddly the company we got this drive from, Treasure Chest Computers, also sent us a 60 MB drive we did not order. We asked from them to prepay the shipping back but they wouldn't do it so we just kept it. So this was my introduction to the "IBM compatible" scene and dealing with weird companies. I enjoyed the video!

[@catriona_drummond]

Your voice lowers my blood pressure and pulse rate by 10%. Take it as a compliment, please.

[@rubenschaer960]

Love your content. Would be interested in a video about the last series of Super Socket 7 CPUs and how AMD arguably kept the platform relevant beyond it's prime with dirt cheap, 550MHz K6-2s and 3s. For a student with no money, those things were a game changer back in the day.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Super Socket 7 is definitely on my agenda 🙂👍🏻

[@nexxusty]

3DNow! Tech. I remember it. K6-3's were pretty decent with a Voodoo 2.

[@drone_video9849]

02:20 - you should have saved that air coming out of the bag, it would have been very clean air from back in the 1980's!

[@AutistCat]

These things cost a fortune at the time! I never understand how new old stock even exists for such valuable items! Crazy!

[@Ragnar8504]

I can only imagine an institution bought it as a spare but never needed it. Public institutions weren't allowed to sell, donate or give away any items in many European countries (and in some instances still aren't) so the two options were keep or scrap. If the IT person was conservative, the only logical choice was "keep" and so it might've got hidden behind mounds of newer items, only to be re-discovered when it already had collector's value. I've heard of a museum that isn't allowed to sell or give away anything but can (inofficially) tell employees when certain items will hit the skip to be disposed of (and then turn a blind eye on anyone attempting to rescue it).

[@AutistCat]

@@Ragnar8504 Very interesting. Sometimes I wondered if it was because a warehouse company or wholesale supplier goes bankrupt and the stock gets stuck in legal disputes for a while and can’t be touched...but how would that explain 20-30 years of keeping the stock untouched? Someone buy it at auction and doesn’t know what it is and then some other bloke gets his hands on it and figures out what it is? In any case, this is so fascinating! LOVE channels like this and this kind of content!

[@bunter6]

Love the sound of those old drives. I've just been testing MFM & RLL controllers and drives before selling them on eBay. One of your German compatriots bought 3 controllers off me, 2 MFM & an Adaptec RLL one. The testing took me right back to my 1st days working with PC's, using sstor etc to low level format the drives and mark defects.

[@roguethinker6284]

I love this channel. Brings back so many memories. Why are there not more subscribers. Great channel!

[@karolwojtyla3047]

I like smell of the new/old electronics at the morning. xD

[@EgoShredder]

I remember in 1991 seeing a friend's Commodore Amiga A600 with a 20MB hard drive attached, and thinking that was HUGE. At the time I was using floppies on other friends Atari ST and I still had an old Amstrad CPC464 with cassette!

[@DrDavesDiversions]

Point of comparison: I bought the 84MB Seagate ST-296N in '90 for my Amiga 2000 (and still have it, although it gets intermittent errors so copied it off to SD). Price lists from early '90 (that I have) show it at $500.

[@Roads_of_Europe]

Back to memory lane. Installed so many of them. With novel netware on them. Wow, so long ago already. Very nice. Thank you.

[@WDeranged]

Woah. I had one of these in my first PC. A huge 286 with an Intel Above Board absolutely stacked with 2MB of RAM.

[@djesky1]

I love the intoxicating smell of fresh out of the pack electronics.

[@phazonclash]

The first hard drive I ever owned was 11MB, in my good old 286. This 20MB drive was huge back in the days 🙃

[@nzwedjat]

My goodness, you have me reminiscing something wonderful.... as soon as I saw the drive in the packet I thought ST506/MFM and then my controller, to format # debug go c800...., such great times.... thanks, your a legend!

[@SaltyMeatHook]

Huffing SCSI is rare these days. Good work!

[@xyzconceptsYT]

Thanks for the nostalgia throwback. 😉👍

[@evergreengamer5767]

love the sound of that drive never can bring myself to use cf adapter in retro builds, also remember scrapping a 225n many years ago the frame was turning to dust from oxidation but i kept the platters as trophy lol

[@Leeki85]

You still get blinking light for CF or SD2IDE adapters. It's good enough for me, but I also didn't liked old HDD noises anyway. More modern HDD have much nicer sound. Also with CF or SD card you can build totally silent retro PC and access time is like on modern SSDs. My old 386SX build is so much more responsive with SD card as HDD.

[@MrHBSoftware]

@@Leeki85 you can do the same with a cheap pentium 4 or even a virtual machine...if you want a 386 you should have an old hard drive to go with it, aswell as a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive...

[@Leeki85]

@@MrHBSoftware Pentium 4 is just an abomination. Hot, noisy and uses way too much energy. Probably the most useless CPU family ever made. Pentium 4 is useless for MS-DOS gaming, since there were no motherboards with ISA slots and it's useless as Windows 9x or XP machine. Athlon XP or 64 is way better choice for that. As for virtual machine, the whole point of using real hardware is much lower input-lag. Emulation like DOSBox or Poem is a good solution, but real hardware with CRT monitor feel different. Also 386 PCs can be 100% passively cooled, so SD2IDE not only makes such machine more responsive, but also totally silent.

[@Privatier-ce6oy]

I love your videos. Keep up your good work !

[@savagemadman2054]

I remember everyone pronounced SCSI as "skuzzie" back in the late '90s / early '00s.

[@lemagreengreen]

Still do, don't we? not that we say SCSI very often anymore.

[@simontay4851]

I still say SCSI, not skuzzie.

[@mstcrow5429]

Official sound spelling is "Scuzzy." Apple wanted "Sexy," although not sure how seriously.

[@Ragnar8504]

Oh yeah, and the German bastardisation of that made it nearly unrecognisable :-D Sounded something like "skuhzy" and most Austrians thought it might be something related to cheese.

[@tj71520]

I sometimes refer to it as "skaaarsi"

[@Michele_aka_Latente]

Damn park.exe this give me memories.

[@Xoferif]

Amazing what we used to accomplish using such meagre resources... Recently a 20-something colleague of mine received a freebie USB thumb drive and tossed it aside in disgust because it was "only 1GB" and therefore "useless".

[@Blackadder75]

1 gb is pretty useless tbh. you can't use it to install an iso , or to make a a significant backup. And 64Gb flash drives are less than 10 Euro these days

[@mantragonist]

Lustig, dass hier eine deutsche Version von MS-DOS verwendet wird. War meine beste Zeit damals als Computerbauer. Danke für dieses nostalgische Video. 🙂

[@TheRailroad99]

This brings back memories of my first computer, an Atari PC3, which had a similar drive. I still remember the startup and shutdown sound. Also the seek sound from these stepper motor drives is much better than modern HDDs. I was 5 years old when my dad gave it to me to learn writing on a computer. (It was very old already then, this was most likely 2004 or 2005). The first words I could write were "C:\word\word" and "park C" for opening word and for parking the disk drive before powering down the machine. One day it did not boot anymore, just showing a flashing cursor. I bet the HDD was defective, it had bad sectors before already. But I did what all children would do: I took it apart to look what was inside. Of course, after that it never worked again. Too sad, today I could probably reinstall or restore it in a matter of hours. the only thing I kept for another few years was the amazing buckling spring keyboard from it. Eventually even that wore out and developed non-functioning keys.

[@FreihEitner]

That gigantic 5-1/4" full-height drive having 20MB -- it's hard to believe that 5 years after that I had a PC with a 3-1/2" 245MB hard drive, and about 3 years after that I had a gigabyte.

[@TheSudsy]

I bought that exact drive in early 90's from a local paper advert. It was out of a company server or something. Got it up and running on my amiga - after making a 25 to 50 pin cable.

[@joelmarcott3282]

WOW! Never seen an ST225N with a SCSI interface!

[@the_kombinator]

I remember how excited I was to find an MFM Type 1 drive from a DEC Rainbow machine. 10 megabytes! Double the height as yours but half the capacity! It was made a year before I was born, and ended up in a 286 from 1986 and sold on eBay, not before making a bunch of videos :D

[@ctiborkoza8944]

Thank you for a nice video review of this beautiful hard drive, it brings me a lot of memories

[@szabolcsmate5254]

Oh my god! I dropped my 170MB IDE drive and had no money to replace. A friend offered a pair of the MFM version with with the MFM interface card. All he wated in return was one of the one blank faceplate that came out of my case. (The 2nd went in place of a 5 1/4" floppy) That, after running my 386 off floppy disks for months was one of the biggest upgrades of my life! :D

[@VladoT]

Nice video, I have Seagate ST-4096 that works correctly only if it is mounted upside down 😀

[@UpLateGeek]

I'm really curious how a drive sits for over 30 years without even being opened, let alone used. Maybe the original owner bought it as a spare in case their first one broke? Although it would've been a very expensive drive back in the day, so it must have been a business if that were the case. Anyway, very cool to see it finally getting put to use!

[@b747xx]

Good old souvenirs. My second computer did have one of these ST225, the MFM version. I remember it did need violence to make bad sectors vanish. (When you have a bad sector on one of these, you know by the sound)

[@greypatch8855]

Easily one of my favorite channels man!

[@Wishmaster1183]

Ahhhhh I found a seagate ST225 disk 2 months ago but with an MFM interface with its respective WD brand controller! It was very exciting to turn it on and start like the first day!

[@Darek80]

My first HDD has 40MB (3/1.5in) but it was on "standard" IDE interface. Sound of spin that "old" hdd is amazing like starting jetplane.

[@kemi242]

I love that new hard drive smell. Thankfully it didn't change over the decades. :)

[@CPUGalaxy]

😉

[@ArifIkhwan-if4fp]

I have install Windows 3.0 in Seagate 80 Megabytes in 1998, and it was amazing experience using Windows 3.0 that time. And installing Wibdows95 in new PC with fast HDD 600 MB Quantum Mavericks was a new experience that time.

[@stephenbruce8320]

I know that drive, it was the first drive I ever owned but it was an ST506 Drive which was in a custom box that looked like an IBM PC case custom modified with a Commodore 1571 to control the drive to make it usable with a Commodore 60 or 128. The unit was called a DATA Chief and it worked in an odd way by creating a bunch of partitions to emulate either 1541 or 1571 Disks but natively it would combine all those disks to appear as one big 20MB Partition but you could still access each partition to make it appear as a single disk or just use it as one big drive the thing did not care how you utilize it because it had both a bunch of directories or one large directory all at the same time. Yea weirdware but at the time very impressive.

[@Damien.D]

That sound is lovely

[@frankwales]

I remember those drive sounds from the 65MB ST-277N drive on my Amiga 2000

[@mark12358]

My A590 had that drive mounted inside! Cheers, M

[@accedetovegandriversrodnry9279]

A590 had 3.5" drives

[@pierredoucet6933]

Man the memories. I had a few regular ST225s, yes a few, I got them late for next to nothing when everybody already had hdds with hundreds of MBs. I was opening the computer case and switching them as if they were big floppy disks. I have an anecdote about the first ST225 I received, the guy who was selling it didn't bring a controller card, since one of the connector looked like a floppy one, we did what seemed obvious, connected the hard drive to the floppy controller. We even managed to low level format it as a 720k "floppy", don't ask how, I had no idea what I was doing, ran some commands I found in my dos manual to invoke low level formatting routines from the bios. It behaved like a very fast floppy and could boot msdos. In the end I got a controller and reformatted it to its proper capacity.

[@simontay4851]

"we did what seemed obvious, connected the hard drive to the floppy controller. We even managed to low level format it as a 720k "floppy", don't ask how" What!! WTF! How the hell did you do that? The pinout of the connector is completely different to IDE, MFM or SCSI for a start. Floppy is 34 pin, IDE, MFM and SCSI have more.

[@pierredoucet6933]

@@simontay4851 check the ST225 connectors on the video (not the scsi drive, the other one), the 34 pins one is exactly the same as a 5.25 in floppy drive. Remember how those floppy cables had 4 connectors, 2 for pin headers and 2 for these pcb connectors. Maybe the drive ended up as 1.2MB then, it's been almost 30 years.

[@pierredoucet6933]

And now I know stuff about computers and electronics. Just found an ST225 manual online, the read write signals are on the small connector, my story really doesn't make sense, I wouldn't believe it myself... Well floppy drives also use MFM encoding, I should have kept these drives and try to recreate this weird case.

[@tj71520]

I never had Much scsi but I do Remember 20 and 40 MB harddrives

[@RobinDerFuchs]

Beautiful memories! :)

[@fnglert]

God, I was 13 when this thing came out. I feel old now.

[@cpmf2112]

nice, my first hard drive was an IBM 10m full height full depth monster, but my second computer had the ST238R for a small but huge improvement.

[@MrHBSoftware]

rll right? never liked rll

[@CH32mix]

Omg i remember using park before shutting down the computer... now it makes sense what it does

[@gvii]

I still laugh when I think back to when I got one of those 10 Meg double bay monstrosities for my XT. 10 Meg! I remember thinking at the time that I couldn't possibly use all that storage, but it was awesome to have it. Lol, good times... As for the ST225, I think the one I had is still sitting in box somewhere at my parent's house, along with a few other bits and bobs from the old days. I remember coming across it a few years ago while moving some stuff around for my mom. Should go digging one day, see what all is still left.

[@levieux1137]

I was getting 239kB/s from my MFM ST225. There's a trick, on such old disk drives, you need to low-level format them with a different interleaving. These drives had almost no buffers and during the transfer of a sector the disk was still rotating. So depending on the bus speed you may need a 1:1, 1:2 or 1:3 interleave. Given that you're almost twice as slow as what I used to have, I'm pretty sure yours was formatted at 1:3 or 1:4 while mine used to run at 1:2. At 3k RPM and 17 sectors/track the on-disk bandwidth is 50*17*512=430kB/s so if the SCSI version has enough buffers to store more than one sector, maybe it can be formatted at 1:1 and reach that speed. Otherwise 1:2 will give you roughly the 239kB I was getting.

[@IkanGelamaKuning]

Apr 1989, I still remember those days as yesterday.

[@otakujhp]

That head sound is just lovely.

[@sbalogh53]

Brings back memories. My SSD drive makes zero noise and even my rotating HDs are very quiet.

[@NiPPonD3nZ0]

Awesome... Simply awesome!!! Your videos are so cool...

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thank you!

[@dl8cy]

The sound of the hard drive reminds me to my 30MB Atari Megafile 30 (this was a RLL Drive - Seagate ST238R) - witch I bought in 1990 for 999.- DM (~ 7030 öS or 511 EUR)

[@kennethgrainger1112]

My first drives were ST-241, with the stiction problem. The interface on the ST-225 is ST-506 Interface. MFM is the encoding method on the media. RLL is an extension to MFM that gets you to 1.5x the space. N stands for Narrow (8 bit) SCSI.

[@ESDI80]

From what I remember, SCSI was created by Seagate at the same time the ST-412 (MFM/RLL) interface was. This drive was probably targeted toward non Intel based systems such as the Macintosh as they used SCSI on their later hardware. I know Seagate made their own 16bit MFM / RLL controllers but not sure on SCSI. The low transfer rate is most likely due to your controller being 8bit. You would probably see double to triple the transfer rate on a 16bit controller. I'm very curious as to what interleave was used when low-level formatted. I would recommend running Spinrite to see if you can adjust the interleave for better performance. Most 8bit controllers ran a 3 to 1 interleave at best with 16bit controllers running a solid 1 to 1 interleave. I'm also curious if the drive electronics are running a true SCSI interface or using a SCSI to MFM converter. I'd love to see a follow up on this to see if performance can be improved using a 1 to 1 interleave and a 16bit controller. There are other disk parking software out there that may work with the Adaptec controller you have.

[@CPUGalaxy]

all right. you were definitely motivating me to make a follow up on that topic. 🙂👍🏻

[@thegeforce6625]

I’m sure @Seagate would get a kick out of this!

[@dav1dbone]

I remember seeing the prices of these in magazines back then, wow! They rose exponentially from lowest storage to highest - often the top few would have "TBA" as the prices were so volatile, probably to get customer's to phone up. Look at mechanical HDDs now, anything under a few TBs - practically junk!

[@Dragonfire511]

I love the sound the heads make.

[@viniciusschneider705]

Oh, nice intro, it's better than the old

[@lemagreengreen]

Very cool, never saw a SCSI version of that drive.

[@itsevilbert]

You had me watching at the mention of ST225. It is a real shame that all the new helium filled spinning rust drives will instantly fail once enough helium leaks out (shortly after their 5 year warranty).

[@AureliusR]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it, but it wasn't actually necessary to park the heads before shutting down. You only *really* needed to park the heads if you were going to move the computer or drive. It even mentioned this in the manual, I think. Though I doubt it causes any harm by parking...

[@bertholtappels1081]

You must do a spinrite level 4 exhaustive test!!

[@38911bytefree]

The spin up and head noise .... classic Seagate.

[@sebastian19745]

I found this drive and his controller board in a 286 computer at a recycling center. The rest was in bad shape so no worth salvaging. I used it as a boot disk (installed PLOP boot manager) in my Athlon XP machine. I used to boot DOS, XP and Slackware from different HDD. Dos was on the seagate. Later I found two CD-RW SCSI drives that I used with the same SCSI controller. The beauty of Plop manager was that allowed to boot from USB, thing that the Bios was bad at (badly identified USB drives). If I remember well, the SCSI controller had a external port that I used once with an external tape drive to recover some backups.

[@borrie869]

I was about the age of 7 when my parents upgraded our dual floppy drive Amstrad to a 20mb hard drive, cost for them was around $700 AUD in around 1989. At that stage I don't think any of us had any idea you could fill a hard drive, I think we still just run most of our games and programs off the floppy disks.

[@edgeeffect]

I used to collect those Seagate 20M drives... but I never had a SCSI one.... they are so reliable... you could use them as a football and they'd still spin up.

[@edgeeffect]

I just made the same comment on your NEC V20 D70108D video... Which is funny considering I'd already been here a year ago. ;) I used to know an engineer who would fix "stiction" on these drives by "spanking" them... they were indestructible.

[@flashstar99]

Awesome video and drive. In the states we call the interface "scuzzy".

[@MaskedGEEK]

Jebus. I don't know what I'm more shocked about. That Seagate has been around for that long, or that there was once a hard drive with only 20MB on it. I saw a 72MB over on EEVBlog's channel from the mid/late 70s and that thing was huge, both in storage but also physical dimensions and it required gas cooling which the drive had special ports on it. Crazy. The smallest hard drive I ever had was a 320MB drive for my Compaq 486 laptop. And to think, that SCSI drive works as new. Retro tech just lasted, unlike today's tech where the threat of a fart within 10 feet of it could break them.

[@BaumInventions]

Drinking game : Drink a shot for every "very nice". :D

[@HuntersMoon78]

Also Park.exe brings back memories of using an Amstrad PC1640

[@n2n8sda]

22:49 was it you or the control software that gave the drive the volume label of st225m ? :)

[@CPUGalaxy]

a mistake by me 🤦🏻‍♂️

[@streetpreacherumm]

Amazing !!!! Please continue with this channel , Pure vintage electronic porn!!!

[@CPUGalaxy]

of course I continue 😉

[@chouseification]

a 20 MB SCSI drive? wow that had to have cost a fortune when new!

[@SeanBZA]

Last SCSI drives I used were a pair of Hitachi/IBM Deathstars, and they certainly lived up to their reputation of quiet failure. Still have the Adaptec PCI card though, along with a few of the cables and terminators, the Deathstars were the inside drives, outside cable had on it a Zip drive and a HP scanner.

[@davidnull5590]

In 1989 that 20 MB hard drive was around $1,400 when new, that was roughly a week and one half wages for a well paid system architect/system designer back then, it was a lot of money.

[@chouseification]

@@davidnull5590 & SeanBZA - yeah that was around the time when my buddy had an Amiga 500 and he was considering getting a hard disk for it - the prices scared him away, even though he really wanted one badly. My first (my old man had one earlier, but I mean my own) IBM compatible was one I bought in high school - it was a '286-12 and came with a 40 MB MFM or RLL drive. It's funny now to be playing a video game (Dyson Sphere Program) where my save file is already over a gig in size, and I haven't even visited most of the planets, yet this 20 megs at the time was a LOT of space. :P I tended to avoid SCSI for the hard disks my own PCs just due to cost, but the Zip 100 running with the Adaptec SCSI controller that Iomega was selling was a great deal (for a non-booting controller) and wow it was so fast compared to the parallel port one. I had a few friends who made that mistake and had to treat their Zip drives just like a tape backup unit; whereas I setup Mac boot disks (to use in the lab on campus) and used it on my own PC just like a hard disk. :D

[@Qassu78]

When that drive was new back in 1989 it had a price tag of 329USD. Imagine how much storage you can get today for that money :D

[@bundesautobahn7]

The message on screen "Do not depress CTRL-ALT-DEL". I didn't know that this key combination (aka STRG-ALT-DEL) is prone to depression...

[@ioannis69k]

ST-225 was my first HDD !!!

[@Uf1r]

That was my first HDD drive, was installed into soviet ES7978.

[@dennisp.2147]

Very cool... Completely obsolete even by the time it was made. Probably what saved it.

[@AmstradExin]

These controllers are pretty rare now. But really cool!