# A Very Old Hard Drive



## Marlin Guy (Apr 8, 2009)

I ran across this one yesterday, still in service every day.
It's in an old PC connected to a Rheometer in a factory lab.
It runs a DOS program for testing materials.

The HDD was full, so they asked me to pull it out and archive some files from it to free up space. She's back up to about 40 MB of free space and doing fine now. :lol:


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## Marlin Guy (Apr 8, 2009)

Note the power connector.
This precedes the red-to-red rule :lol:


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

Thats not that old, it's still at least IDE technology, now lets see someone pull up a post with a RLL or MFM drive technology still running...:lol:


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## phrelin (Jan 18, 2007)

I have one of these 5 MB drives stored under my house. I could dig it out if someone wants to try to make it work:








It is only slightly bigger than and in the early 1980's cost me significantly more (in actual dollars, not adjusted) than my current desktop tower quad core computer. Ah, the good old days....


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## dennisj00 (Sep 27, 2007)

Yes, if I remember, 5MB --more than we would EVER need -- was about $4000 dollars and the external power supply was bigger than the full height 5 1/4" drive.


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Hmmm..... just to see how the prices dropped....

March, 1987 - $2,650
March, 1988 - $2,027
March, 1989 - $895
March, 1990 - $1,391 (?)
March, 1991 - $700
March, 1992 - $362
September, 1992 - $400
March, 1993 - $360
September, 1993 - $345
March, 1994 - $298

Source: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.html

Nowadays, you can't even find a flash drive with only 80MB.


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## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

Yeah. I have older drives than an 80MB


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## Marlin Guy (Apr 8, 2009)

RasputinAXP said:


> Yeah. I have older drives than an 80MB


Still being used every day?


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## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

Probably in the same types of machines, yes, in the Science department. Some of these things we don't even want to sneeze around, just let them keep doing their test tube thingys. `


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## jerry downing (Mar 7, 2004)

I used to rebuild those 80MB and 300MB washtub size drives after a head crash. As far as I know, none are still in use.


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