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Yowza! RIP Conner HD

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BGoins12

Experienced Member
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Oct 12, 2011
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Location
Amherst, Ohio
My Dad works at a CNC machine shop, and today while he was loading a program onto an older machine they have, the hard drive decided to die. He said it just started clicking continuously, and it popped up on the screen "General Failure reading drive C: - Abort, Retry, Fail?". He said they tried everything, but it was dead.

The drive? An old 120MB Conner CP30104H hard drive. The crazy thing? This machine has probably been running up to 20 hours a day, 6-7 days a week depending on overtime. I'm assuming by the size of the drive that it's about 18-20 years old.... so to me, that's pretty frickin' amazing! :cool:
 
That seems to be the luck of the draw in a lot of cases. I've had a lot of Conner 3.5" drives (still have a few). Some drives expired gradually; others ran until I took them out of service.

There probably are a few JTS drives kicking around still working--maybe? :)
 
So what's so ugly about Conner drives?

I haven't seen a really pretty drive since the old Miniscribe FH drives (e.g. 8380E) with the finned and nickel-plated HDA housing. Or maybe Maxtor FH drives with the "MAXTOR" cast into the HDA. All 3.5" drives are pretty much blah. Some of the older Priam drives with the clear HDA housing (like the 8" and 14" Shugarts) were kind of cool.

I've got a few Conner 300MB and 400MB drives, that, while still operable, are slowly dying with creeping flaws.
 
The early Western Digital Caviar drives were pretty classy looking, until they cheapened out and switched from a glossy black case to an ordinary bare silver metal case. And unfortunately many of them quickly developed terribly noisy spindle motor bearings. I have some old 80 and 120 MB Caviars which still work fine, but make an unbelievably loud racket!
 
Nothing beats the sound of nuts and bolts rattling in a coffee can. heh
I had a few drives like that. Still have an old (working!) Seagate 50MB SCSI that sounded like that.
 
The loudest hard drive record in my house goes to the Seagate family. The first, a 2gb, and a ST-225 hold that record. The 2gb (can't remember the model) is jittery, vibrating the floor vigerously. I can feel the vibrations from it two rooms away. The ST-225 in my Panasonic Sr. Partner is loud and proud. It's hard to talk over it.

I've got two Conner drives, both are working. They aren't loud at all.

Maxtor drives are ugly. Three of mine have gone out, and another has the pending click of death.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
The ST-225 in my Panasonic Sr. Partner is loud and proud. It's hard to talk over it.
Click to expand...

Old Seagate drives vary greatly in their noise output due to manufacturing differences and how worn-out the motor bearings are. I've used some ST-225s which moan and roar like a piece of industrial machinery, and others which just make a low, soft hum.

On the other hand, Kalok Octagon drives are all totally silent... because none of them work anymore!
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Maxtor drives are ugly. Three of mine have gone out, and another has the pending click of death.
Click to expand...

That doesn't square with my experience, at least not in the high-end FH 5.25" (SCSI, ESDI) range. I don't think I've ever had one of those fail--they were mostly taken out of service because 760MB isn't what it used to be.

An interesting tidbit about the first Maxtor 3.5" IDE drives is that they got the words reversed in the "total number of sectors" doubleword in the IDENTIFY response packet. Early driver code (I wrote some myself) would do a sanity check by multiplying the CHS fields to see if they came closest to the total sectors doubleword, or the same field with the words swapped.

To the best of my knowledge, Maxtor was the only manufacturer with this glitch in their firmware.
 
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