It is quite possible to put a touch of watch oil on the shaft of an
older drive (without opening it) to quiet the bearings and re-libricate
the grease. I'm still running RD54's and RD53's without much of an
issue, firing them up every few months seems to keep them happy.
Same for RD51's and RD50's. By the time you get to the full height
Hitachi ESDI and CDC half height ESDI drives they just seem to work
without complaining. No issues there.
C
(I love RD53's: They were the biggest disk you could run in a
Pro/350-380 and I have opened them to free stuck heads. They have an
absolute air filter in there which filters the air as it is sucked into
the spindle to be blown out over the heads, so to be honest I think you
can open and close them without the world coming to an end.
Just don't sprinkle salt from a shaker into the drive to see if the
heads will FINALLY crash (yes, eventually that will do it).
On 2/25/2024 10:09 AM, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:
On Sat, Feb 24, 2024, 9:41 AM Rick Bensene via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Another trick was for drives whose read/write amplifiers (which were
typically situated within the sealed chamber, thus not replaceable except
in a clean-room facility) had become flakey, and the drive would start
getting lots of I/O errors.
I would take the drive and put it inside a large ziplock bag, along with a
bag of desiccant(this part is really important to suck up moisture in the
air in the bag), and a small battery-powered digital thermometer. I'd put
it in the freezer until the drive had reached roughly 42F, and then take it
out, and immediately hook it up to an archival system and power it up while
it was still cold.
This would allow me to get the data off without I/O errors as long as I
could get what I needed before the drive warmed up enough that the weakness
in the amplifiers again became a problem. I found out about this trick
somewhere on USENET many moons ago. It worked for me a number of times.
This jogged some brain cells. I vaguely recall placing a container full of
ice on top of a drive to keep it cool enough during operation for its
bearings to not start screaming before I was able to copy all the data of
of it.
Sellam
