On 8/30/21, charliebrownau <charliebrownau@protonmail.com> wrote: > Honestly I would be amazed if any RLL/MFM or IDE drive > still works from 1985-1995-2000ish era For what it's worth, occasionally I pick up 1992 model Amigas (A600, A1200) with the original IDE drives still in place and working. I'm not sure why the expectation is so low. We need to remember that the drives from this era were not used nearly as much as drives are now, but were still spun up and exercised regularly at boot. There was no swap partition; we had the opposite, a RAM disk for swapping disk content to RAM :). A lot of software still didn't (officially) install to hard disk, and for other software there was little reason to install it to hard disk. Writes to the disk only ever happened as a direct result to a user operation like "Save file" or whatever. This is a good combination of factors for hard drive longevity. 2000ish is a pretty low bar, too. No drive I have from that era has broken down. These are all in PC systems running Linux or DOS. Still, the hard disk is usually the first thing I replace in the old computers I use a lot. If there's an IDE interface, I'll usually put a compact flash card there. When you exercise a drive for the first time in potentially decades you might eventually run into problems related to disuse even if they're not worn out. Best regards, Philip
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