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Philip Linde linde.philip at gmail.com
Thu Sep 2 09:25:30 BST 2021
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On 8/30/21, charliebrownau <charliebrownau at 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'mnot sure why the expectation is so low. We need to remember that thedrives 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 noswap partition; we had the opposite, a RAM disk for swapping diskcontent to RAM :). A lot of software still didn't (officially) installto hard disk, and for other software there was little reason toinstall it to hard disk. Writes to the disk only ever happened as adirect result to a user operation like "Save file" or whatever. Thisis a good combination of factors for hard drive longevity.
2000ish is a pretty low bar, too. No drive I have from that era hasbroken down. These are all in PC systems running Linux or DOS.
Still, the hard disk is usually the first thing I replace in the oldcomputers I use a lot. If there's an IDE interface, I'll usually put acompact flash card there. When you exercise a drive for the first timein potentially decades you might eventually run into problems relatedto disuse even if they're not worn out.
Best regards,Philip