...to  old-harddrives.com  !

This is the first virtual hardware museum dedicated only to hard drives.

We invite you to have a trip to the world of hard drives. Join us on the way back to the early 80s when the big hard drive technology boom started. Find out where today's hard drive manufacturers have their roots, explore the impressing diversity of the hard drive pioneers' products and listen to the drives in action.

Hard drives at a glance

Hard drives are ferromagnetic mass storage devices usually running as built-in ("fixed") components in personal computers, servers or drive arrays.

Hard drives consist of a mechanical component containing a number of rapidly rotating platters on a spindle and a corresponding number of read/write heads reading and writing data on the platters which have a magnetic surface. This mechanical component is called Head/Drive Assembly (HDA) and is completely sealed with only a small filtered breathing hole as connection to the environmental air. The reason is that the HDA is extremely sensitive to dust. Each piece of dust has a destructive effect to the drive mechanic when getting between a rapidly rotating platter and the r/w head which flies only a few nanometres above the platter's surface. Therefore a HDA must never be opened in environments that is not 100% clean and dust-free.

Moreover the drive has an electronic control unit responsible for motor/head control, error correction as well as data encoding/decoding. The complexity of the electronic control unit varies from a less complex control layer sharing its work with an external HDD controller to highly integrated embedded systems with firmware code of more than 100 Kb.

Our mission, our vision

old-harddrives.com is a place where the history of the unsung hard drive technology is documented and preserved. Fortunately there are a lot of people that declared their mission to be the preservation the history of computing by collecting, restoring and presenting old computer systems, peripheral devices, components, chips and CPUs. What we want to do is doing the same for the world of hard drive technology.

Our vision is to be able to present items of all existing hard drive generations and series to the public someday.

The amazing art of engineering performed by all those manufacturers all over the world is really worth to be preserved. Those pioneers will never be forgotten!

 

Now have a nice time exploring the world of hard drives of the old days. Hundreds of drives are waiting to be remembered...