Ancient WD HD 1990

[Dave A]

Found this in my desk as I cleared out for retirement. No idea where I got it. A WD HD with a date code of Oct. 1990 and a whopping 85.3 MB of space. A flip phone photo would have been too much for this. I wonder what it cost in the day?

[dishdude]

$500? lol

[MadMan]

Neat. I've got piles of old HDs from my high school days (being the computer kid for the entire school). Literally so many that even over a decade later I'm still using them for door stops lol

[lnx64]

"Optical"? Is that an autocorrect because as far as I know, these aren't magneto optical. :P

[Dave A]

Thanks and fixed. I was scuffling with a USB DVD drive at the moment and my cat brain failed.

[vts1134]

Too cool!

[Tube TV]

Old hard drive sounds are music to my ears.
Found it on youtube. Sounds a lot like the one in my IBM Aptiva.


Probably $500 bucks back in the day.

[Jeffhs]

There is, of course, a hard disk drive in my Dell Optiplex 755 computer, but I keep most of my files on a thumb drive and a few USB sticks. I have many files on 5.25" disks as well, but I haven't looked at them in the longest time. I've had system breakdowns where I have had to reformat my entire hard drive; those USB sticks and my thumb drive have all my important programs on them, so I never have to worry about losing any of those programs, some of which are either not available any longer or are so old they are extremely difficult to find--if they can be found at all.

[ESigma25]

85 megabytes, wow...my smallest is 131MB, installed in an old 386 tower.

[Mad-Mike]

My smallest HDD is a pair of 238MB drives that spend time occasionally in my NEC Versa laptops. Usually I'm using the stock 540MB or hoppped up with a DDO Seagate Momentous 80GB Drives on those.

Shoot, my Tandy 1000A has a 3GB drive in it on an XT-IDE controller. I don't care as much about being period correct, more about having enough space to worry less about floppy disks.

[MIPS]

Those early 90's IDE interface WD drives were great. C/H/S paramaters printed on the label, sleek looking and relatively quiet. Also cheap but still quite reliable.
I keep a reasonable hoard of drives going all the way down to 5mb because I run into a surprisingly large amount of machines where modern replacements such as flash disks or emulators are not financially viable. I have a few Caviar drives as well because they work really well in 386 and 486 machines.

[rld-tv01]

I purchased an IBM 6mHz AT with 20 MB HDD in 1984. I later upgraded the HDD to 40 MB. I also upgraded the CPU with a Evergreen 386 upgrade kit. Then put in a Video Charley Video frame grabber and changed the original 16 color digital video display adapter to a SVGA with NTSC video out. Also added a Roland MPU401 Midi adapter. I wanted an Amiga video toaster but couldn't afford one. I spent more on the upgrades then the original computer cost me. I still have all the original IBM AT computer components as well as the upgrades. I remember buying a 500 MB HDD in 1994 when the price per meg dropped to $1 a MB.