Show off your old and retro computer parts

[sub68]

4 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Tried out one of the vintage Barracudas I picked up a while ago and learned quickly it has to be screwed in. It vibrates so much that it'll fall right off whatever flat surface you set it on. Was planning on testing it today, but as not to bother my roommate I'll have to do that tomorrow.

Man I thought my HDD's were worse that sounds like my macbook air

[da na]

5 minutes ago, sub68 said:

Man I thought my HDD's were worse that sounds like my macbook air

uh you should go get your macbook checked out

 

I use high performance disks all the time, 15K drives that have no noise dampening at all so when they read and write it shakes the whole case... but this level of spindle motor noise is really something else.

 

Finished testing those drives! I bought 5, 4 of them initialize on my SCSI card (and are labelled as C: and having only 80 flying hours!). The other one just clicks, purrs, and beeps at me. Very good odds for buying 5 untested vintage drives

[sub68]

6 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

uh you should go get your macbook checked out

no it due to it spiking 80C on CPU and me mauelly putting fans on max

 

[8tg]

Going through my pile of C64 floppies to see what all works. So far, only one dead disk, Accolades “Fast Break”

One disk with security, Golden Axe, which requires a manual I googled to get the keywords.

And a few I cannot find manuals or control references for which is a pain, a lot of the racing games have the most asinine controls and they make no sense.

Gyruss is my default and it’s a cartridge because it’s fun and simple

GeOS because why not, I have both disks but no ram expansion to do anything, I’ll need to get a ram expansion 

my boss really likes this one and wanted to drop by to play it in the future, Jordan vs Bird: One on One

I need a second Atari controller as this is a 2 player game only

This start up screen for test drive is god tier, it’s a great intro I highly advise looking up. As a game to play it’s a nightmare, I don’t have blank 5.25” floppies or two drives, you load the game, then load a “scenery disk” which is a track, and then load a car disk to pick a car, there are so many loading screens and disk swaps the multi disk install of GTA V on the Xbox 360 looks reasonable 

but it is really cool when you get going

 

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, Mel0n. said:

Tried out one of the vintage Barracudas I picked up a while ago and learned quickly it has to be screwed in. It vibrates so much that it'll fall right off whatever flat surface you set it on. Was planning on testing it today, but as not to bother my roommate I'll have to do that tomorrow.

 

I guess the crazy speed of 7200 RPM comes at a price!

 

That is worse than any of my Barracuda. My; 20GB OEM ATAIV, 80GB ATA IV, both SATA 200GB 7200.7, 80GB 7200.7, 160GB 7200.9 all vibrate far less.

[Dabombinable]

I have a lot of SDRAM to verify (to think I was originally worried about not having enough due to faulty boards). The Gparted CD I burned 8 years ago is proving useful once more:

[ApolloX75]

@8tg

CLASSIC.

 

I got into this scene after the commodore's time, but not much longer after.

 

I started with a 386 and then a 486DX2. And I remember doing our very first Windows 95 install when we broke out of DOS after picking up our first Pentium machine. It was with 3 1/2 floppy disks, and I think it was like 12 or more disks you swapped between to do that whole thing. So terrible.

 

The later days of swapping discs for FF VIII and Baldur's Gate 2 had me tripping with flashbacks, but that wasn't nearly as terrible in hindsight.

[da na]

27 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

That is worse than any of my Barracuda. My; 20GB OEM ATAIV, 80GB ATA IV, both SATA 200GB 7200.7, 80GB 7200.7, 160GB 7200.9 all vibrate far less.

Those are all much later drives. The first Barracuda was '92, this falls somewhere around '95, by the 2000s when those drives are from 7200RPM had gotten good enough for consumer market. This is still when the Barracuda was a server drive, with many platters and no concern for noise.

I concur that my ATA based drives, being consumer grade, are far quieter.

[Dabombinable]

16 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Those are all much later drives. The first Barracuda was '92, this falls somewhere around '95, by the 2000s when those drives are from 7200RPM had gotten good enough for consumer market. This is still when the Barracuda was a server drive, with many platters and no concern for noise.

I concur that my ATA based drives, being consumer grade, are far quieter.

It is about as loud as my 20GB and 60GB Maxtor/from Quantum factory 7200RPM HDD. Manages to sound far better though.

[Dabombinable]

Turns out that I had forgotten about my lone 512MB unbranded stick. No idea which system I'd use it in though. Got a matching 2GB kit, 3x 256MB kits and a 512MB kit - and bank interleaving does net a good performance boost.

 

[da na]

7 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

It is about as loud as my 20GB and 60GB Maxtor/from Quantum factory 7200RPM HDD. Manages to sound far better though.

It's still not as loud as my 1999 10,000RPM IBM drive.

[flibberdipper]

2 hours ago, Mel0n. said:

Tried out one of the vintage Barracudas I picked up a while ago and learned quickly it has to be screwed in. It vibrates so much that it'll fall right off whatever flat surface you set it on. Was planning on testing it today, but as not to bother my roommate I'll have to do that tomorrow.

 

I guess the crazy speed of 7200 RPM comes at a price!

Man I miss the sound of old HDDs. Really need to find more Bigfoot TS drives and buy them. Probably will be stuck with 12.7GB drives since the 19.2 like what I used to have carries a comically awful premium.

[GeorgeMKane]

On 10/30/2022 at 5:28 PM, Beerzerker said:

There is a mod for adding the 4 pin plug to an A7N board, the guys at the bot have been working on it to improve power delivery and the results so far have been good.
I may try it myself one day.

I feel like back in the 90s and early 2000s, people cared more about performance than looks. Once manufacturers started making more cases where you can actually see into the builds better, that's when people started caring about looks more too.

[Dabombinable]

38 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Man I miss the sound of old HDDs. Really need to find more Bigfoot TS drives and buy them. Probably will be stuck with 12.7GB drives since the 19.2 like what I used to have carries a comically awful premium.

Gotta have all 5.25" bay filled.

[da na]

More retro hard drives... can we just take a moment to appreciate how damn fast IBM's server drives were in 1998? This IBM Ultrastar (before the brand was bought by Hitachi) from 1998 beats out my modern 7,200 RPM disk arrays. It's a 10,000 RPM disk, but one would think years of innovation could beat this drive... but nope! It's faster in small transfer sizes than both a single Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000, and three 7K2000s in RAID 0. 15 years separate the drives. Yes, the new drives demolish the late 90s one in sequentials, but its seek performance is truly astounding.

 

[abit-sean]

As it is the anniversary of Apollo 17 I thought I would share this. Back in the days when computers needed lots of space. Man on the left is my great Uncle, images taken from honeysuckle creek tracking station (honeysucklecreek.net)

 

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, abit-sean said:

As it is the anniversary of Apollo 17 I thought I would share this. Back in the days when computers needed lots of space. Man on the left is my great Uncle, images taken from honeysuckle creek tracking station (honeysucklecreek.net)

That's amazing!

[da na]

Disassembled the broken 1996 Barracuda and it's a feast for the eyes. I've worked on numerous server drives and vintage drives, but combine the two and you get the best built, prettiest drive I've ever seen. It's got two THICK filters, these are 2-3x as thick as normal drive filters, and just look at those ten platters!

Here it is next to a similar age Seagate PC IDE drive, which was basically the WD Blue of the day.

You can see the magnet shape is very similar, as well as the design of the heads. 

I fixed the broken drive accidentally just by disassembling it. I couldn't immediately find anything wrong, so I ran it open and it worked just fine. Concluded the screw on the spindle motor on the lid was too tight, disallowing the drive from spinning up.

[da na]

Not too 'retro' so to speak, but still interesting hardware you don't frequently see. I opened up my Precision M6700 to upgrade from 4x4 to 4x8gb DDR3. 2 slots are under the keyboard, the 2 primary slots are on the other side in the back. These under the keyboard are the second DIMMs per channel, the CPU's controller runs 2 channel/2 DIMM per channel. Here you can see the absolutely insane heatpipes in the laptop. Above the RAM sticks you can sort of see the edge of the MXM board of the video card, the heatpipe above it goes to the left heatsink which is larger, as well to its own smaller heatsink/fan assembly on the right. The CPU (a 45w i7) has its own two heatpipes that go up to the left, the aluminum plate is barely visible above the touchpad.

The new RAM I installed was 4x8gb DDR3L-1600 1Rx8, here's the old stuff. Very interesting memory, XMP overclocked to 1866mhz. 

Basically no laptops support this RAM. 

[S-Ki1156]

XMP memory... I think I have an 3rd gen Core i7 ASUS that took a Ballistix stick just fine. DDR3-1866 is what's written on my stick. By far, the most ironic thing is... it came out of a Pentium N3530 laptop no less, which doesn't recognize more than 8GB memory max.

[da na]

Built another clear hard drive, this one with an RGB LED read activity indicator.

 

Looks absolutely fantastic mounted in my XP system's front bay - I have it turned sideways in the dual 3.5 bays so it's clearly visible from the outside.

 

[da na]

Also added a color changing HDD usage LED to my testbench's case. I think it came out quite well.

 

[Bitter]

R(etro)GB

[Mitko_DSV]

On the topic of HDDs I have a question. So in my nice XP PC I use a WesternDigital Raptor WD740, I also have a WD Blue 250GB from 2010 and a Patriot Burst Elite 120GB SSD (brand new and pretty cheap - 25 lv. ~ $13.50). I need a reliable drive and can't decide wich to use. Really like the Raptor (XP boots with the same speed on the Raptor and the SSD), but it has 70348 running hours on it, the WD Blue has the most space of the three, but it has 60555 hours of runtime. Do you think it is wise to continue to use the Raptor or should I change it? One day it started making weird sounds, sounded like metal to metal grinding, but next time I started the PC it didn't have this issue and has worked perfectly for a few hours since then.

[da na]

10 minutes ago, Mitko_DSV said:

On the topic of HDDs I have a question. So in my nice XP PC I use a WesternDigital Raptor WD740, I also have a WD Blue 250GB from 2010 and a Patriot Burst Elite 120GB SSD (brand new and pretty cheap - 25 lv. ~ $13.50). I need a reliable drive and can't decide wich to use. Really like the Raptor (XP boots with the same speed on the Raptor and the SSD), but it has 70348 running hours on it, the WD Blue has the most space of the three, but it has 60555 hours of runtime. Do you think it is wise to continue to use the Raptor or should I change it? One day it started making weird sounds, sounded like metal to metal grinding, but next time I started the PC it didn't have this issue and has worked perfectly for a few hours since then.

Use the Raptor, that's basically a server drive and it can definitely run for many more hours. I boot my Win7 system off two RE3s with 10 years of flying hours.