per
Veteran Member
I'll put my hand up and say I bought one of the two this seller had up for auction. I grabbed mine a few weeks ago and it was a similar config, though mine also included the connecting cable too.
I justified the price given how hard it is to find a complete set of Extender + Receiver + Cable, and also the cost of 2x ST-412's... I'd actually planned on purchasing a working ST-412 as the one in my XT had recently died, but those were going for anything from US$150-500 depending on the seller. This extender came with two drives in unknown condition, so I took a gamble. The seller was really helpful with shipping (I'm in Sydney Australia) and it arrived in one piece.
To my surprise, once I completely disassembled the thing and removed the inch-thick layer of brown smelly dust off everything, it worked perfectly when put back together. Both ST-412's were flawless too (not even a hint of dry bearings). When plugged into my XT booted to a DOS prompt off one of the drives. The seller told me this had been sitting idle in the back of his repair shop for around 20 years, so it is impressive the HDD platters kept their data for that long. The top cover was pretty scratched and marked, but that's to be expected for an item this age. I was also surprised at the length of the connecting cable... I've read elsewhere they're usually short only allowing the extender to stack on top; the IBM-branded cable this came with allowed the units to sit side-by-side with ample length to spare.
I'm very happy with the extender; I hope another member of these forums managed to grab the other extender he had up for auction, and had similar success. As everyone mentioned it was a pretty steep price, but I've been wanting one of these for over a decade, and the price was off-set when you factor in the cost of two working ST-412's.
Now all I need to find is a working 130w 240v power supply for this thing (currently it's plugged into a 110v step down transformer, but it works).
Congratulations .
You should still make sure that the HDDs don't suffer from bad sectors due to disk-crash. When I bought mine 5161, each of the two HDDs had one bad sector each due to this. The only way to note is that some sectors may be unaccessible, and you may get errors when you try to read files located in those sectors. To prevent disk-crash when you move the unit, the R/W heads in the drive has to be "parked" (there is an option that does this on the IBM PC/XT diagnostic disk). Allthough you may not have bad sectors, I would still suggest to low-level format the drives and reformat/repartition them just in case (also with respect to the privacy of the previous owners).
The process involved in low-level formating depends on what HDD controller you have. Se here for more information: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...e=How+To:Low+Level+Format+XT+Class+Hard+Drive
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