At long last, I got hold of a decently well functioning ESDI drive. From my earlier adventures, I had a WD1007V-SE2 controller, as well as an older WD1007A. The WD1007A (Compaq branded) used to live in a Hyundai 286 machine …Continue reading→

More or less by accident I found myself writing a very basic DOS utility to read data off of an IDE drive. It started out by just issuing the IDENTIFY DRIVE command and capturing the data, but adding the ability …Continue reading→

More or less everyone knows that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Seagate did not label their drives with a date of manufacture like everyone sane would do, but instead used a custom and somewhat mysterious/confusing “date code”. For reasons that …Continue reading→

A couple of weeks ago this antique 1997 Cheetah 9 drive showed up at the OS/2 Museum: It was effectively a freebie, a faulty drive bought together with another, more desirable, and working drive. (Well, initially working, but that’s a …Continue reading→

The other day I was trying to decode the “lot numbers” printed on certain Seagate drives. In the meantime, I realized that those lot numbers have been in use for quite some time. They were in use around 2000, like …Continue reading→

Some time ago, the OS/2 Museum obtained a 10 GB Seagate ST310014ACE hard disk (IDE 3.5″ low profile). The disk was unusable because it was locked. That is, it needed an unknown password to gain access to the medium. After …Continue reading→

Lately I found myself in the possession of several Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives. These represent the pinnacle of hard disk engineering; with 15,000 RPM, the drives deliver up to around 200 MB/s sustained throughput (both read and write!) and …Continue reading→