30 yr old Hard Drives : Caviar Edition

[@robertoXCX]

9:58 sounds like one of MikeTech's sacrificial hard drives for testing power supply loads

[@maxtornogood]

Love that MikeTech got a shoutout in the comments, I enjoy his vids!

[@TheDiskMaster]

Lovely! Those Caviars are often still kicking, in my experience. I've got a video of my own on spinning up a bunch of new-to-me vintage hard drives, mostly much older than these. It'll be my 6th one since starting this channel.

[@Volvotech740]

I absolutely love those old Drives

[@TigTex]

I heavily recommend hdat2, a modern MSDOS utility to wipe, test and even repair hard disks. It does a lower level access to the drive, bypassing any partition or file system and can truly test the drives from sector 0 to the last one. If the drive supports reallocating sectors, might even refurbish them back to usable state. Works with HDD, SSD, floppy, USB media and even optical media (read only)

[@adulaney2004]

I second this.

[@ohareport]

i absolutely love the power up sound of those old wd caviars 11000 - 33000. the seek “click” was also more like a seek “chonk” especially compared to later drives which always sounded delicate and brittle to me, by comparison.

[@minutemanqvs]

On some defective drives of similar types, you should try swapping the PCB with the "physical" part of other drives. For example on the one which does not make any spinning sound, it might be worth using the PCB from another defective one.

[@the_kombinator]

I have like 5 of them from an 80 Mb to 635 Mb - They are indestructible, all of them work.

[@priosmithxd]

I love this kind of Hard Drive Testing videos. Looking forward to Part 2. Also I wanna watch teardown of the old broken hard drives lol.

[@sebastian19745]

I used to low level format the drives with bad sectors and sometimes the bad sectors just dissapeared and the HDDs were reliable. I used a program called The Troubleshooter (HBCD 6) or simply Ontrack Disk Manager. Not always the bad sectors were caused by a deffective media, and by LLF, it was erased and "revived", especially seems to be the case with the last HDD thathad one bad cluster.

[@wskinnyodden]

That 200Mb might work if you warm it up with a hair dryer. Had one with the exact same issue, some times didn't start, mostly during winter in a damp room, but the hair drier fixed it every time until the upgrade.

[@RetroBytes265]

i love these old drives i hope i can get my hands on some soon. great video

[@maxtornogood]

I appreciate the sound & styling of these Caviar drives, I'm going to enjoy this clip when I get around to it!

[@NuffMan_]

Now do yolo Raid 0 with the failing harddrives and see how long it works

[@twentyrothmans7308]

I brought eight drives from the 90s back from home, halfway across the world. They hadn't been powered up since 1999. Every single one was kaputt. It broke my heart.

[@Nunya58294]

They lived a long life for sure

[@lpseem3770]

No way. You're back! I still use pata drives for an old Fostex recorder and swap them as they go. I'm working on some interface to use solid state memory.

[@danjswan1160]

Very much looking forward to part 2!

[@justsumguy2u]

I love hard drive testing videos, and this was a lot of fun; looking forward to part II! The age of a hard drive isn't really important, it's how many hours they have on them. I have some from the mid 90's that are still in perfect condition, because they weren't used all that much

[@brother_dana]

the age matters to some extent because the bearing grease dries out

[@dlarge6502]

Age matters greatly. - capacitors fail due to age (many old HDDs use tantalum capacitors, known in the retro community as a major failure point on old motherboards) - Grease and Oli fails due to age - Other electrical components change value or fail due to age - Corrosion - The platters may have lacquers on them that may fail due to age (as happens with an IBM "Deathstar") And finally, the data on a HDD fades with time just like on many other magnetic mediums. You can stave off losing the data by reading and rewriting every sector, something that Spinrite can do, or a "non-destructive" R/W test. But, there is no way for you to refresh the servo tracks. Once the servo tracks fade too much or can't be read correctly due to any other reasons, the drive is toast.

[@alexclaudiu2003]

In 5 years I changed 3 Western Digital Green 1 tb Hdds used in a surveillance system with a low recording rate and every time the electronic part it broken and besides that, the pins on the motherboard plug with plug from the turntables oxidizes. I have 3 retro PCs with Western Digital HDDs from 25, 20 and 15 years ago and they are still perfect.

[@jonpoeschek]

I'd be curious if SpinRite would be able to clear up the one that gets stuck at 25% formatting

[@djpirtu2]

My first really big hard drive was 2GB Caviar. Bought it just because I was going to Assembly -96 (if I remember the year right) and there was a LOT of warez shares on local network.

[@pederb82]

Well. I must admit I have never ever from 1996 onwards used single drive setting on any model of disk. I’ve only used master or master and slave if i installed two disks. You can use one disk just fine with it set as master.

[@dlarge6502]

Yes, I have had the same experience till I came across ONE drive recently that really did want to be in single mode!

[@ollyalme]

Ahh.. memories. And why did I throw away so much old computer equipment during the years..

[@CantankerousDave]

Weight. Those old hard drives are *heavy*. And don’t get me started on the steel cases.

[@RetroTechChris]

Hey, this is my kind of video, loved every minute of it! Caviar: accept only the finest!

[@krz8888888]

I'm jealous of your collection, I always loved the look of these caviar drives. I preferred the performance of the quantums but they are mostly all gone now due to the rubber issues

[@rodhester2166]

I really like using old hard drives for retro builds. The sound is just part of the machine. That being said, I do backup the drives to a newer form factor just in case. Just for fun I have a pci ide card and had raid running and the sound of 4 drives at once was magical.. lol

[@CantankerousDave]

I still have some Promise 100 cards sitting around. I used them in a video editing rig because it was the only way to get the transfer speeds required for video capture back then without spending a fortune on SCSI.

[@rodhester2166]

@@CantankerousDave that is what I have, promise fasttrak 100 tx2.

[@JaapGinder]

Have some, somewhere. Need to test those. I wonder...

[@marcroulleau9510]

Hi, I still have some of those old hard drives, even if sadly my coner 40mb die two years ago, it was 32 y.o ; I also loose a few weeks after a bigfoot, that I used on a pentium for win95. (both have been replaced by CF ...) One of my favorite actually is a 170Mb western digital, that I use on my compaq prolinea 4/25s it has this very specific noise crrrcrrrcrrr I love it ! It was fun and sad to watch your video , I really enjoyed it ! Thank you !

[@LabCat]

Ahh... a Prolinea 4/25. The sounds of my high school days, booting Windows 3.11 to play The Incredible Machine and Lemmings. A fine choice, excellent example of its vintage.

[@boblister6174]

Out of curiosity was the bigfoot quantum or maxtor labeled? I have one left working in my collection that is a quantum but many bad sectors. I honestly think maxtors down fall was buying quantum's hard drive division after their QC when to hell in the mid to late 90's.

[@marcroulleau9510]

@@LabCat I use it actually to play lemmings , battlechess, dune, and all the classic DOS games of that era :)

[@marcroulleau9510]

@@boblister6174 It was a Quantum, he die trying to boot win95.

[@wskinnyodden]

Hahhhh, that caviar HDD sound... Unforgettable! Also pretty good memory of the Seagate 20Mb and 40Mb IDE disks hehe oh and one refurbished 75G IBM disk that got hot as heck but hey worked till I got rid of it (was always a secondary though)

[@VicTheVicar]

My experience is that as long as you "low level format" the drive with FDISK and do a slow format with surface check, then they're usually all good for another couple of years. The magnetic track benefits from being rewritten every now and then. I got a bunch of 30-35 year old 40Mb SCSI drives that still works just fine. Larger drives are usually problematic. Drives from the early 00's are usually just fine, but I've had very little luck with the drives from the mid-90's.

[@dlarge6502]

You can't low level format IDE drives, and certainly FDISK is totally incapable of low level formatting. FDISK doesn't even format, it creates or modifies a partition table, which is a tiny part of the disk. Refreshing the data always helps. But, nothing can refresh that servo track. Nothing. Once that gets too weak, bye bye drive.

[@mrmerlin6287]

I've been unfortunate in building a lot of 15-20 year old PCs from my teens in so far as all the IDE drives I kept have pretty much failed on me now. I miss those sounds.

[@jarinaumanen8447]

All my hard drives of different brands from the 90s to the 2000s, about 30 of which were stored in the basement, work perfectly. The only hard drive that has ever broken is the infamous Seagate 3Tb. I was able to make one of the two defective ones by changing the bios circuit from one to the other. The other one was mechanically broken somehow.

[@alfabètagamma-k7p]

My experience from the past is Seagate's were doing well, WDC failing a lot. Nowadays it seems opposite. But i'm looking forward to the next brand of testing rounds.

[@arnlol]

Really nice video! I wonder if a PCB swap would revive the one that does not spin up at all. Result wasn't the best, though it looks like you already had tested some of them previously and already knew some were bad (red X on them etc)

[@alanharkleroad4376]

I had a 2540 catastrophically fail on me from a Gateway. It sounded a lot like the silver one you had that was dead. Needless to say, I couldn't save the Gateway either due to battery damage.

[@charlesdorval394]

- What failure mode makes hard drives do the clickety-click? - Also, I'd swap the board from the clicky drive to the totally dead one, just for the hell of it. - Maybe there's a SMT fuse or something on the totally dead one's PCB

[@dlarge6502]

HDDs click like that when they can no longer locate or properly read the servo tracks. Before a drive has any idea where the heads actually are it must locate the servo track that was put on the platters by the factory at a specific location. If it can't find the servo track it moves the heads back to the park position and then tries again. It repeats this several times. This is what makes the clicking. Over time the data recorded on the platters fade. Filesystem data, partition tables and data files are easy to refresh simply by rewriting the files. However, you can't do that with the servo tracks. As they fade they keep fading till they are gone and the drive becomes useless. The heads could also be damaged, or even the circuits driving the heads. Basically if it can't see the servo track the HDD never initialises

[@charlesdorval394]

@@dlarge6502 I see! Thank you so much!

[@endorfun22]

Love that sound of these drives. I had a 486DX4 100, was gutted a friend with a Pentium 120 and both out performed mine. Very strange no mention of the click of death, which was so well known. Bad clusters, bad sectors both being referred to in the video. Bot meaning the same, so strange them both being used to confuse. Bad sectors term being more well known and used.

[@nickwallette6201]

The "click of death" was _mostly_ associated with ZIP drives. It's kind of shorthand for any mechanical drive that has a recurring retry behavior, but I think if you ask someone what they associate with that term, the first thing to mind probably wouldn't be HDDs. Their failure modes were more varied and the behavior depended on what was actually wrong. Sectors are the lowest addressable unit of a medium at the hardware level. Clusters are a filesystem construct, and are made of a group of one or more sectors, in a power-of-2 multiple. So, if you're talking about a drive-level issue, it's a bad sector. If you're talking about a FAT disk utility that is marking bad spots on the disk, it can only mark _the entire cluster_ as bad, regardless how many sectors in that cluster are, or are not, usable. Ergo, when you're speaking of a disk that is formatted as FAT, then for all practical purposes, a bad sector means a bad cluster, and a bad cluster is one or more bad sectors. It's not _technically_ correct to use them interchangeably, but since they're so tightly coupled, it's fairly common to consider them vaguely synonymous.

[@Schule04]

From my limited experience, the older Seagate, Maxtor and Quantum drives often still work today, while most WDs and all Conner drives I found were dead.

[@senilyDeluxe]

Conners often have a relatively easy to fix fault - the read head is stuck in the parking spot.

[@bertholtappels1081]

Interesting. Do you own a copy of Spinrite? Version 6.1 just came out. It’s probably the world’s best low level HD analysis and recovery tool. Absolutely worth letting it loose on a pile of these!

[@simontay4851]

The WD6401AALS 640GB HDD in my PC is over 10 years old. Still working perfectly.

[@gilbert1975nf]

15:54 - perhaps you should create a little partition like 50M, just to initiate the diver and been able to format it.

[@tomekrv942]

I love videos about these old drives. I would like to see some experienced electronics engineer works on them. There must be some way to fix electronic boards. Of course mechanical or surface problems are imposible to fix but some of them for sure have electronic problems.

[@charlesdorval394]

Oh wow, the first hard drive I added to my 386 was A 1210! :) Blast from the past right there

[@the_kombinator]

That was my first upgrade in 1996 or so. I have the same drive in an NCR 386 DX/33 right now!

[@stathissim]

I love my WD Caviar 83MB still is kicking it :)

[@wskinnyodden]

Only once I had a hard drive sounding like a chainsaw actually work and allow data recovery, it was an "early" SCSI 500Mb drive in those days those were 5.25" sized shoe boxes, but the enterprise class (which at the time SCSI was pretty much all around) really showed up when recovering that data, slow as a snail but every last bit read out.

[@wskinnyodden]

You'd be lucky to get an 80Mb drive at that time (IDE)

[@matthewday7565]

Try MHDD test / relocate on the one with 1 bad sector, I though the old WD tools offered surface scan + relocate, but maybe I'm thinking of a different make, maybe it needs an old version of wddiag, not sure if the capability is there in modern Data Lifeguard

[@TUSIP]

I pick up 5 IDE drives from an IT guy, for my windows 95 PC, only caviar worked and formatted. 2 of them didn't spin and other 2 caused computer to freeze.

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

18:40 B-B-B-B-B-Bad-bad to the bone! 🎶

[@BVN-TEXAS]

The master or Toby setting ? It’s funny how some places like California are banning those terms in their IT depts.

[@SidneyCritic]

Isn't there only 2 types of failures with mech drives, ie, disk surface, and head control. Maybe pop the lids and see what it's doing, ie, which failure it has, and then seeing if swapping parts between failed drives might get some working

[@acubley]

I think I had a Caviar in my first build in '94. Been using WDs ever since. The only drives I've ever had fail were one Maxtor and two Seagates, the last being an EXOS 10tb less than a year old.

[@kinkykane0607]

Dam 10TB is a lot of data to lose. I am assuming you had the drive cloned?? :)

[@acubley]

Had everything backed up.

[@angrydove4067]

Hard drive Solitaire? I hope you saved the magnets from the dead drives.

[@86smoke]

What about running HDAT2 with those of the discs that shows bad sectors?

[@Christopher-N]

It would be neat to see two compatible dead hard drives, cannibalized to produce one working hard drive. I would also like more detail on how to run two hard drives on the same computer. I tried doing this in the early 2000s, but was unsuccessful. I don't remember if I was doing it right or wrong, or if two simultaneous hard drives was not supported by the system. I would have been able to save more files from the dying drive.

[@FrustratedApe]

I noticed the 540Mb drive was marked AT&T/NCR, I reckon this has come from an ATM or till.

[@dougjohnson4266]

For myself, I am glad HD's are almost outdated and very happy CRT's are gone.

[@burntoutelectronics]

37% over thirty years is in line with a 10 year life expectancy

[@maniatore2006]

My oldest Hard Drive is a Seagate MFM 20 MB HDD and it works very well, no bad sectors.

[@TheDiskMaster]

Probably Seagate ST-125 or ST-225, if I had to guess

[@borlibaer]

I remember the black WD Caviar IDE had been the crème de la crème for SOHO. Since Year 2003 I do stay away from WD.

[@FrechdachsDaniel]

Could it be that it is the wrong IDE cable? I thought there were 40 pin IDE cables and 80 pin IDE cables. I think with old systems you have to use the 40-pin IDE cable. That's why the hard drives don't boot. But i could also be wrong..

[@pselvi]

Try running hdd regenerator on the drives with bad sectors, you might get lucky and revive some.

[@HyperionCC]

I couldn't imagine the amount of unknown dos viruses that can be collected from these drives...🙂, i think you should make images of each hdd before wiping them clean

[@woldemunster9244]

Dismantle those broken drives and loot the magnets. i have one old drive where i put discs from other drives, 8 disc stack gets a lot of gyro force when you spin it up, ;D

[@Toby_Q]

If I recall correctly, IDE drives should never have bad sectors. And you should never low-level format IDE drives with regular tools. Some IDE drives can be low-level formatted, but only with the manufacturers tools. Additionally, the reason IDE drives should never have bad sectors is because they should automatically remap bad sectors internally to spare space. If you have bad sectors, that means it's already had enough bad sectors to run out of that spare space and it's now having to just mark them bad. That means the drive is starting to fail.

[@RetroShare2]

On the not recognized ones, can you swap the pcb and the rom?

[@gentuxable]

So if you set the volume label to B with 10 spaces behind you could make someone using fdisk go crazy... why didn't I know this when it was relevant?

[@tarajoe07]

A single working Conner drive will surprise me

[@anandmoon5701]

I stil have Quantum 4.0AT 4GB Bigfoot Hard Drive from my old system. not tested as of now.

[@CantankerousDave]

Anyone else do the freezer trick with a bad drive back when “stiction” was a problem?

[@andrewprettyquick2070]

Takes me back to amiga days. 540MB of 16bit euphoria. mmmmm

[@CantankerousDave]

Look at Mr. Fancy Pants, my first Amiga’s drive was 50MB. (My 4000 had a 120MB drive. I think I still have that one.)

[@mikecawood]

I have some old hard drives but they are all of relatively small capacity so are of limited use.

[@JenniferinIllinois]

Ah, love some caviar. Oh you mean hard drives. Hehehe... I've always had the best success rate with WDC drives. Of course I wasn't try to access drives for 30+ years ago. We won't discuss my success rates with Connor and Quantum drives though. ;)

[@Grow_A_Pair]

Has anyone had any luck connecting the caviar 2420's or 2540's to their modern windows 10/11 PC or within a live environment? I cant get anything out of mine... and they seem fine, they pur when powered up. Any ideas?

[@e1woqf]

the click of death I remember those days

[@dlarge6502]

You can have those days today. A couple of years ago I ordered a brand new 3TB WD blue from Amazon. Guess what it did when I excitedly powered it up?

[@e1woqf]

@@dlarge6502 😱

[@LetsPlayKeldeo]

Hell yeah more clicking fun

[@andrewdupuis1151]

smallest hard drive i had was 30 meg then i went 2 gb back then

[@OuTannu]

maby it would be a nice addon video to run a tool like HDD Regenerator or simular on the drives that have bad clusters and see what happens... and if the drive than passes a few erase sessions writing garbage zeroes and ones to it... to stress the drive....

[@CounterStriker013009]

those hard drive can reuse as mini server for smart phone :) be caution the scammer in outside

[@protox07]

I like your videos

[@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365]

6:18 Sounds more like an electronic issue than mechanical. Perhaps it can be fixed. At least should be possible to test by swapping boards.

[@MeOrNotMeWhoKnows]

"I do find that 5 to 10 year life expectancy of mechanical hard drives isn't really what I have considered to be fact. I mean I have lots of old hard drives which are like 20 years old which are still working". This is a mix of misinterpreting statistics + survivorship bias. :) Those 5-10-year figures from Google relate to data center hard drives - ran 24/7 and mostly under load, so it's a logical error to assume that typical desktop PC hard drives work in the same conditions and last the same number of years. They obviously don't, and especially with those old vintage PCs - many of them have actually survived to this day because they haven't been used all that much and were just sitting for decades after only a few years of initial use. And that's where the survivorship bias lies as well - you just haven't encountered the vast majority of those old dead hard drives because they went into the garbage bin without your acknowledgement, many years ago. As a retro guy you find the ancient computers with hard drives inside of them, some of which are still functional, but most of their siblings are long-gone - the drives or whole computers thrown away due to either power issues (caps etc) or HDDs dying. So you're looking at the stack of those Maxtors or WDs on your desk, but not seeing 95%+ of the same models from those years that have been dead for a very long time. The sources from which you get your old HDDs don't allow to draw any meaningful conclusions regarding average HDD life expectancy, those systems you get them from are "survivors" and it's pretty much the textbook definition of the survivorship bias.

[@ruthlessadmin]

It makes me sad that these old drives are probably never going to be able to be repaired or replicated by the community, like has been done with so much other hardware. One thing you can try with them, is swapping controllers around and maybe salvage one or two but in all likelihood, they're all mechanical failures.

[@sluxi]

lots of factors that make it pretty hard to just give a meaningful figure for how long you could expect a HDD to continue functioning. Is it being used 24/7 or just sometimes, with what kind of usage patterns? what era is it from? etc. I find 5-10 years to be a pretty decent estimate if I think of how often I've had to replace newer drives than these on my home server.

[@oblitum]

😍😍😍😍😍

[@mikesilva3868]

😊😊

[@Those_Weirdos]

"Some hard drives last longer than 10 years, so the idea that they generally live 5-10 years is clearly false".

[@dlarge6502]

Well considering the huge failure rate he has here already...

[@KameSense]

These were not durable, on my own experience. On the other hand, I still have Maxtor drives from these past days which are still working well.

[@bstar777777]

Weird that I have zero nostalgia for HDD sounds.

[@LabCat]

WD stepper motors always sounded the best. Conner was second best and everything else was ... meh. Of course, Quantum Fireballs can always be counted on to live up to their name.

[@tony714keene]

5 to 10 years of life span of mechanical hds is bull. I think it depends on the hd.

[@BladeworksStudio]

stone empire monk virus stops sys

[@CarlosAranhaBr]

My cats didn't like the sound of your old hard drives. They recommended you get new ones

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

Western Digital is notorious for making garbage hard drives, and it all started back in the 1990's. Even today, they are the worst. Those drives you have, have long exhausted all their reserve space for remapping bad blocks; they're ticking time bombs, even if you were to use them in a mirrored ZFS pool.