A Teardown History of PC Data Storage -- The EIectronics Inside 17

Yes. It vigorously spins the reel back and forth to break the end of the tape loose, then it slowly unwinds the tape while sucking it back through the tape path and onto the pickup reel.

Ha! Amazing! They are the vacuum based ones right?

You need to keep an eye out for a HP 88780 9-track autoloading tape drive, just for its loading mechanism:

https://youtu.be/CEL8wnW5uvs?t=42

I would love to get hold of some of the older tech! If you ever see any, let me kow!

Molex - they must have made a fortune on that connector alone!

I remeber someone I knew back in the day had a 10K RPM 1.7GB (I think) SCSI raptor array with 8 drives. The thing sounded like a Helicoptor taking off during spin up, and machine gun fire when the read / write heads were going!

Another trip down memory lane.

I recall that my first PC hard drive (20MB) used the ST506/ST412 Shugart interface with MFM/RLL encoding drives long before the (parallel) ATA and SATA days.

There were three connections to the drive, two card edge connectors for control and data, along with the 4-pin Molex connector for power.

At the time I recall most of the intelligence was on a separate hard drive controller card and not the drive itself. This came later with ATA drives with Intelligent Drive Electronics (IDE).

I recall there were also the 'floopy' tape drives - a continuous band of tape. Olivetti had jumbo ones in their document retrieval systems like the P603 model

(I recall that the ones I had access to had a lot more tape in them than this one - the lower section was crammed full of tape and perhaps even had a guide channel so likely a much higher capacity.)

and I think Sinclair attempted a smaller version with their microdrive but that was more like an 8-track stereo audio cassette ?

Thanks for the fun teardown! I remember working with those monster drives in old production mainframes. The first time I had to replace a failed drive, I took the bad one home and tore it apart. I think that was the first HD I opened up. Good memories.

-Kaleb