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So, I found this huge hard drive on Ebay, basically $1 plus shipping


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I was at a friend of a friends many years ago. He was using Amiga PCs and it was the first time we had ever experienced network gaming (I'm guessing very early 90s). The guy was a bigshot in some IT group.  He had a big shiny disk about 18" in diameter or so leaning against the door. We asked what it was. He said it was an old floppy disk. I'm trying to remember the capacity, but it was something like 150kb. We thought the 1.44 MB floppy seemed so advanced then....

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remember these?  Removable platter drives.  11 heads 7 platters and a dust tight cover that screwed on to release them from the machine.

CDC CONTROL DATA Hard Disk Platters - Peripheral - Computing History

There was a large magnet in the drive to move the heads in and out.  It was quite capable of destroying your watch if you got too close.  The heads retracted away from the platters when pulled out but when loaded they moved in and were released to fly on an air cushion just above the surface of each platter top and bottom.  They required clean room air quality as even a single particle of cigarette smoke would cause the head to bounce and when it returned toward it's position it would often crash into the platter releasing more dust and within seconds all the heads would crash wiping out both the 11 heads and all the platters.  The lower picture is of a much smaller device but shows the approximate mechanics.

ST506/ST412 - Wikipedia

 

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