A 250 MB hard drive in 1979.

Fair enough. This was at a municipal auction and they had turned the drive on but that was it. They claimed it was 10MB. Can’t remember how much it sold for

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JasonMckin@reddit

A:\> FORMAT C:

Come back a week later.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

If formatting takes a week... running Disk Defrag probably takes a month!

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I was working for a payroll firm in the late 80s. Our Pr1me mini computers were using CDC 315mb drives that weighed round 100lbs. Each drive came with a printout of the addresses of the bad sectors from the factory, which we had to key in during the formatting process. The formatting process took around 8 hours, give or take.

Occasionally when we powered them down (after a year or so of uptime), as they spun down, the spindle bearing races had worn enough where you could hear the bearings fall out and clatter down the platters.

Cutting edge technology.

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Useful_Resolution888@reddit

Was the man in the paper suit needed to move the heads in and out while it was spinning?

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Joonicks@reddit

yeah. they later hired dwarves to make it smaller.

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MechanicalTurkish@reddit

That is, until they hired one named Sneezy.

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InsaneGuyReggie@reddit

IBM must have hired him for the DeskStar

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Aine_Lann@reddit

My Mac SE had a 20 MB hard drive in 1989 and was only about 1 cubic foot in size. It was a beast!

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JasonMckin@reddit

I wonder if you could build a room of full of these to do something like the Floppotron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oym7B7YidKs

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roz303@reddit

Can we figure out what this drive actually is? I feel like it's for the SDS Sigma computers, in which case this would've been a RAD with fixed heads. Any other ideas?

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buffering@reddit

You would need three of those things to hold the data for a single compact disc.

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Deer-in-Motion@reddit

Must have sounded like a jet engine spinning up.

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EarthAndSawdust@reddit

Disco duro sounds like a dance music spaghetti mashup.