Monthly Archives: July 2021

IDENTIFY Ancient DRIVE

This article will attempt to collect IDENTIFY DRIVE dumps from antique IDE drives, with running commentary. For the purposes of this list, “antique” is defined as a drive model released in 1990 or earlier, typically with the drive itself also … Continue reading

Posted in IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage | 9 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part II

The ultimate reason why I pulled out the old Seagate ST-225 drive was because I wanted to try connecting it to the Western Digital WD1003-IWH board that I recently acquired. The WD1003-IWH is a curious evolutionary half-step between ST506 interface … Continue reading

Posted in IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage | 11 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day

More or less by accident I found myself writing a very basic DOS utility to read data off of an IDE drive. It started out by just issuing the IDENTIFY DRIVE command and capturing the data, but adding the ability … Continue reading

Posted in Documentation, PC hardware, PC history, Seagate, Storage | 3 Comments

Dirty Work

As I’m slowly archiving my giant pile of floppies, I naturally come across specimens that have one kind of problem or another. After going through hundreds of floppies, I can safely say that 3½″ floppies are much less prone to … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, Floppies | 5 Comments

Centaur Close-ups

Readers have expressed interest in seeing what exactly a Western Digital ‘Centaur’ drive looked like. I took a few photos of a WD95044-A drive, the larger capacity (40 MB) and newer variant of the WD Centaur family. Some photos were … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, PC history, Storage, Western Digital | 3 Comments