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What is your favorite MFM drive make/model? What country made the most reliable drive

offensive_Jerk

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This is just an opinion based question. I would like to know which MFM hard drive is your favorite and why. It doesn't have to be for speed or capacity reasons, either.

Also, which country do you feel made the more reliable MFM drives? They seem to have been mostly manufactured in USA or Singapore.

My favorite MFM drive so far in my limited experience with them is the Seagate ST-4038 if only for it's giant size and it's tendency to shake my desk when it's reading in certain circumstances.

seagate-st-4038-1.jpg
 
Back in the day, I had a soft spot in my heart for the Priam 519. That was just before I graduated to SCSI and ESDI drives.

Before that, the Shugart SA4010 was pretty impressive on a personal computer.

On mainframes, CDC 844 and 808; Bryant 4000, IBM 1311 and 2311 I remember fondly.

All US made.
 
I had both a ST-225 and ST-4096 which managed to through almost 20 years of steady use so I am partial to those models. The ST-4096 even formatted to provide 84 MB of usable space, 105% of its advertised capacity.

I think Singapore would have the edge over the US at least for Seagate drives. US manufacturing was closed in 1984 so all the US Seagate drives would have been really early in development cycle.
 
NEC D5626. Basically just an ST225 clone, but I love the chirp it makes (quite distinctive), I like being able to see the wheel going back and forth, and everyone of mine that's arrived without physical damage hasn't needed an immediate low level format. That last point may be luck, but it gives me extra confidence.

Also a personal nostalgia soft spot because I used these drives in my first IBM compatible PC.

Second place would be the Seagate ST251 or ST277R - self parking, weird noises, and good reliability.
 
Can't beat the ol' reliable Seagate ST-225. One with good bearings is surprisingly quiet compared to many newer hard drives.

The ST-251 (and ST-277R) has absolutely the most amazing startup and shutdown sound, though:

 
A ST-225 that I bought back in 1987. Still runs and is part of my 1000SX. However, it's not used on a daily basis anymore which may contribute to its longevity.
 
Quantum Q2040 8" 3000RPM MFM hard drive. Big noisy mofo with a 1/16 horsepower motor. Too big to put in an IBM PC, and would easily crush the toys people call computers today.
 
I had a pair of Seagate ST-4096's that worked really well on my PDP-11/73 with an Emulex controller.
 
Whatever full-heigh Seagate 70-some MB (formatted) MFM drive I've had in my XT for years -- I want to say it's a Wren II? Had to clean the little carbon button on the spindle ground contact, but that's about it.
 
For me would be the CDC full height Wren II 94155 Series U.S. made drive. Same HDA was also was available with SCSI and EDSI logic boards.

I put a used 94155-86 into my Compupro System over 30 years ago, and it's still cooking. The first 20 years of service it ran nearly 20 hours a day.

You can't argue about the superior service life of plated media used by CDC to build this series of drives vs the conventional (lower cost) oxide media that most companies were using at the time.

I tried using Seagate ST4096 about 6-months to a year after they started shipping from Seagate because of the huge price difference between the CDC and Seagate drives (the ST4096 cost about 950+ at wholesale during that time), I think the CDC 94155-86 cost me $500 more than that. Every one of the ST4096s that I sold died very close to exactly 6 months after they were put into service. That's right, every stinking one died. Seagate was quoting 9-12 months to replace under warranty with a reconditioned drive, but was perfectly happy to continue selling new drives to people at the same time. I ended up buying my Customers who had purchased ST4096 drives from me (that were under warranty from Seagate) new drives out of my pocket, and waiting for the replacement drives to be shipped by Seagate.

Yeah, Seagate had new drives to sell to customers, they just refused to channel the revised new drives to existing customer who already bought drives from them. The way I see it, Seagate had a Legal and Moral Obligation to replace the defective drives with the drives coming off the assembly line, and not scheduling the customers with in-warranty broken drives for an exchanged-drive at a later date. To add insult to injury, some of the recondition hard drives that Seagate sent me in place of the defective drives died, the same way as the original drives at the six month mark, and had to be replaced a 2nd time (with a 2nd waiting period). For that reason, I don't trust Seagate anymore.

There are at least two different versions of the Seagate ST4096. One has a flat top to the HDA, and the has a u-shape (horseshoe shape) logic board on the top of the HDA. I don't remember which series were the bad ones, that was 30 years ago.

The Seagate ST225 had a long production and marketing life compared to many other competing drives of the same capacity. The maddening part about the ST225 is that Seagate seemed to forget how to make working ones periodical. I mean I'd be selling bunches of the drives and they would be working fine. Then, I'd hit a rough batch were they were many failures of new drives out of the box. Then, for some reason, new drives would go back to arriving and working fine. Consistent quality seemed to be a problem with Seagate.

In the end, Seagate ended up buying out the CDC 5.25" hard drive line, if I remember correctly to get CDC's 3.5" hard drive technology. Seagate kept the CDC Factory churning out the Wren 5.25" drive for a long period after the buyout, using the original CDC model number at first, but later renaming/renumbering the CDC designed drives with Seagate ST designations.
 
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Maxtor XT-1140... or what I call my tank!

Those are great drives, but I had one fail recently--just started going slower and slower until it stopped. I suspect a lubrication problem.

I've still got a system with a Maxtor "Miniscribe" ESDI drive, after the "brick in a box" maneuver--the HDA casting says "Miniscribe", but it has a label wrapped around it that says "Maxtor Colorado". That one still works, although it's pretty noisy.

I had lousy luck with a CDC Wren II MFM drive (purchased from a real CDC retail store in St. Paul), but the 330MB Wren III SCSI in one of my systems still works fine. Hooked to an Ultrastor 14N controller (another rare bird).

...and then, there always the good old ST506...I never did find a use for that thing.
 
Rodime it is. I have a RO204E that I acquired in the late 80's from a company that was unloading some outdated equipment. This was by far my first such drive, and there was no setup information with it. At that time there was no internet to ask either, so I made a phone call to the company in Ireland. A very nice gentleman was delighted to get a trunk call from the states, and supplied me with the drive's parameters.

It is a massive full height 42 meg drive, with a slow dramatic spinup complete with a power light that blinks until the drive comes ready. Then you hear the heads move out and the power light shines steady. The build quality is superb, and it has operated reliably for all this time. I have many favorites in my hard drive collection, but the mighty Rodime has the top spot.
 
When we were selling our systems with a 5.25" hard drive (as opposed to the older 14" hard drive), we started with the Rodime RO-102 (6 MB) and the RO-104 (12 MB) as options. Rodime didn't make those drives for too long and essentially upgraded the order to the RO-202 and 202E (11 and 22MB). Some guys from marketing had a brilliant idea that if they could get the software guys to artificially limit the new drives to 6 and 12 MB, we could sell them an "upgrade" that would expand the customers' capacity. We finally convinced marketing to drop the idea.

This reminds me of when CDC was offering the CYBER 70 series of mainfraimes. The CYBER 72 was essentially the same as the CYBER 73, but with a jumper installed to add wait states--it was a marketing gimmick allowing for artificial expansion of the product line by offering a "cheaper" product. The CE's pretty much all knew about this and a few removed the jumper on customer's 72s to upgrade them to 73s.

The ship hit the sand on this one and a memo went out to the CE community that anyone caught doing the "upgrade" without appropriate $$$ and a PO would be summarily dismissed.

I suppose one could point to a similar situation with the IBM 5170 and the 6MHz and 8MHz versions.
 
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Probably half of my Maxtor big-brick collection is out of use due to bad/dry bearings. Most of mine still power up and work fine - but the noise - eck.

I'm guessing the failure stat is high there because most of them (at least here) probably spent a decade spinning in a server room. I got a pair of 4380E's with my RT unit - one was a NOS spare, the other had been in there since the early 90's - it was hummingbird vs angle grinder.

If anyone knows how to service them I'd be interested.
 
I'm having a difficult time determining a single 'favorite' since there have been a number of really good ones over the years. I can say that my least favorite was the whole Tandon TM50x/TM60x full height 5.25. You could cause a head crash by accidentally moving the fluid damper on the stepper motor, which was strategically (or maybe tragically) placed to where you couldn't help but bump it when removing or installing the drive.....

I had great experience with a Mitsubishi MR535, as well as a pair of Rodime RO-5090's was very good, but my favorite was probably the XT-2190 I had in a Tandy 6000.
 
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Whatever full-heigh Seagate 70-some MB (formatted) MFM drive I've had in my XT for years -- I want to say it's a Wren II? Had to clean the little carbon button on the spindle ground contact, but that's about it.



If you have a Seagate Wren II, it's a CDC manufactured drive (possibly/probably made in the U.S.) sometime after Seagate bought out CDC's hard drive manufacturing.
 
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