HISTORY:
You might think, hell! it's just a hard drive but no .... it is a "slice of time" in the world of technology!
Sit back and let me tell you all about the history of this SCSI drive!
I ran an audio post production facility for 25 years and along the way we created solutions to our clients problems. Some were related to audio production and others pure IT data transfer facilities.
We are talking the late 1990's ~ early 2000's, it was a very different world in those days - Windows 98, XP & Server 2003 were the Microsoft platforms used, alongside Apple gear.
Actually my personal technical history goes a lot further back in time, in the 1980's remember S100 buss industrial machines (some were made here in Seven Hills, Sydney), PDP-11's, VAX servers from Digital Equipment Corporation, 8 Inch Floppy Drives (those were REALLY FLOPPY! and 5.25" had not been released yet!), DOS in it's many, many variants (not only Microsoft produced "DOS"), the Basic programming language and who could forget Windows 2.0/2.11/3.0/3.1 (Urghhhh)
Motherboards sported ISA buss slots with perhaps some of the "new" ubeaut PCI stuff if you could afford it. Most interfacing to peripherals such as hard drives was via IDE but for faster throughput, SCSI was the way to go. SCSI eventually became available in three "types", SCSI-3 having the highest throughput.
For this reason we ran all of our machines using SCSI-3 exclusively for hard drive data transfers, this is one of those hard drives. Back in the day (early 2000's) 9Gb was massive and this machine had two of them! One for programs and the other drive exclusively for music transfer from DAT and storage.
The big STEEL cased cabinet you see pictured was originally a custom made CD duplication machine imported from Trace Duplication (USA). We upgraded that box to a wonderful (most of the time) fully automatic CD media 6 arm robotic machine which was a wonder to behold, while it worked correctly! Sometimes it would lose track of what it was doing and would pickup CDr media for writing and then the robot would start throwing the CDr's around the room like frisbies! Funny (the joke was that the machine was having some "down time", playing frisbies instead of working) but serious at the same time, that was clients music flying all around the duplication room!
Over time, the large PC unit had a myriad of extra peripherals connected to it so that we could easily take data from many different sources for straight transfer to other media or conversion and even some copy protected decryption at times. That is why you can see various CD drives and the ZIP drive in the front and other external DLT and assorted tape drives would "hang off" the SCSI buss accessed from the rear of the unit.
My wordee this is now VERY OLD technology and I see no point in keeping this unit complete so I am parting out the various components that may be of interest to others - not generally for the home computer user but some specialised industrial machines still require SCSI-3 buss drives.
Yes, I will not leave you stranded with just the SCSI-3 drive! I also have a nice Adaptec 29160 card and internal SCSI-3 daisy chain cabling with terminators (it's a SCSI buss thing)
To see these other items, click HERE
So, after that long introduction, let's get down to describing this component ....
IBM - Hard Drive
Made in Thailand
3.5" form factor
Supplied with mounting screws (4) but no brackets
Series: ULTRASTAR
Type: DPSS-309170
Capacity: 9Gb (slightly less when formatted using NTFS)
Interface: SCSI-3 (68 pin D shaped microconnector)
Rotational speed: 7200rpm
Standard +5/+12V DC supply requirements
COSMETIC CONDITION:
Clean
Undamaged physically
Ready to use once again
TESTING:
Fully functional back 15 years ago, which is the last time this machine was operating! The machine (discussed at length above) was decommissioned in 2008 and has been in clean/dry storage ever since - only today has it seen the light of day!
My intention was to power up the machine once again and at the very least reformat this drive but alas .... I do not have an old DB9 pin serial mouse nor a keyboard with a 5 pin DIN connector so I could not get past the POST. I am pretty sure this machine also had password protection on Windows (98? or perhaps Win Server 2003) and also network passwords as this was connected to a 10Mbs wired network! Wow, so fast (not).
I would love to have had a "look" at this drive to not only confirm the functionality but also to "see" what is still on the drive ... I am pretty sure the sound engineer did not reformat the drive so any and all software would still be on this drive, or it could be client's raw music data - depends if this was the system drive or the data drive.
Although untested today, I am 100% confident that this drive will fire up once again and perform as it did all those years ago - no faults and no bad sectors.
Now that the photo session is finished and my description is completed, I have now placed this drive into a sealed ESD "bag" and packaged it within nice cushioning bubble-wrap to protect against excessive vibration.
THE VIDEO BELOW IS OFFERED FOR INTERESTS SAKE ONLY - The robotic duplication system that we used is NOT shown but operates in a similar way i.e pick - place - remove and drop onto the output spindles using 6x robots in one system. Worked well MOST of the time!
