Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

in the mid 90s, i once found a 2gb barracuda (1st gen 7200rpm 3.5" double height hard disk) in the ez-ad. there wasn't much market for huge server type drives where i lived, and the owner was interested in a trade of some random bike parts and a cd-rom drive (a screaming deal, but honestly he just wanted to get rid of it).

it would heat the whole case it was mounted in and make enough noise to be heard rooms away... but it was fast! and two gigabytes was enough for not just one but mulitple linux partitions alongside windows and os/2.

i remember a friend's father losing his shit when i told him i had such a large disk. because it was built for the datacenter, i had to use an external desk fan to cool it. it was simultaneously completely impractical and totally awesome.

ed: there's the beast. shocked you can still buy it! forgot it was scsi (which also made it even faster because the good adaptec scsi adapters of the day offloaded i/o interrupts from the main cpu)! https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8...

In the late 90's/early naughts I was a kid riding my bicycle from garage sale to garage sale and ran across one of these w/all of the random crap to make it work in an early Pentium PC. PCI card and all - I was jacked man. I can remember the neighborhood I got it from and that it was a very hot summer day.

It was obsolete by the time I had gotten my hands on it but I remember being so damn surprised by how loud/hot it was to get it working in one of my legacy systems. It was my first experience as a kiddo with datacenter-esque hardware + SCSI. I think I got Slackware installed on it and then just gave up on it subconsciously due to how much of a PIA it was...

Thanks for sharing that link... wouldn't have realized it was the same drive as my nostalgia-blast if not for the pics. That Barracuda sticker was badass.

Amazing find. Just curious-why would anyone buy this today? For retro-computing/nostalgia??

And who would on to such stock?? Surely these are not still manufactured??

if i recall a few years later, i had an hp9000 at work that had an array of them. it wouldn't surprise me one bit if there were still hp9000s, as/400s or other similar datacenter class unix(ish) server hardware out there that is still in production where replacing a failed disk with the exact same model, even if refurbed, is the safest option for solving the problem with old hardware that can be difficult to replace running software that isn't backed up that no one even understands, yet is critical to some large business.

as another point of trivia, i'll add that it was easy to find because of the memorable seagate model number scheme.

ST12550N

ST - seagate technologies

1 - 3.5" full height

2550 - unformatted capacity

N - fast scsi

if i recall, this scheme went all the way back to the early 80s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com