Preserving/repairing vintage hard disks?

[geoffm3]

Hey guys... I've been thinking about this a bit. Fairly recently I was attempting to get an old Rodime R0652 hard disk running again on my old Mac Plus, and was met with nothing but "get rid of it, it's junk" sorts of comments. Now, I understand wanting reliable storage for vintage workhorse machines, but my intent with this particular machine was to make it period correct, and "junky" small Rodime SCSI drives were quite popular on old SCSI-based machines back in the day.

I really wanted one for the sounds, the noisy platter motor, the unique stepper motor sound etc. Stupid, I know, but at some point in this hobby you have to recognize it's kind of silly to want any of it save to nostalgia's sake.

All that said, are there any efforts to preserve and repair these old spinny disk drives rather than just ditch them? I have done my share of tossing out old MFM/RLL and SCSI drives, but it's obvious now that they are starting to get fairly scarce so maybe that's not the best thing to do.

 

[Al Kossow]

All that said, are there any efforts to preserve and repair these old spinny disk drives rather than just ditch them?

The Computer History Museum has a pretty extensive collection of drives from the estate of Jim Porter, and many that came with
other systems. We don't intend to run them, though, beyond recovering data if we know it is of historical significance.

As far as I know, there is no one that has collected and made available useful maintenance information on restoration of either the electrical or mechanical systems
in 5" or smaller drives. It would be great if I were proven wrong, but I've not heard of any serious non-propretary collections of this
information.

 

[luvit]

There's nothing weird about what you said, at least to me. I've had two hard drives, carefully removed platters and logic boards to make one good one.. And still had no bad sectors.. Is that where you're going with this?

 

[geoffm3]

There's nothing weird about what you said, at least to me. I've had two hard drives, carefully removed platters and logic boards to make one good one.. And still had no bad sectors.. Is that where you're going with this?

Yes, exactly. Seems like throwing them away, particularly the less-smart hard disk varieties should be a last resort for old disk drives.

 

[luvit]

Yeah, I agree.. I've not done the model of hdd you're talking about, but I can't seem to feel it would differ..
A big consideration: for rare drives, what are the chances of having 2 or 3 bad ones to make one good one? I've only done this with exact make/models before they were rare..