head assembly

I had the opportunity to visit a data center in the 80's, they had dozens of those drives on one floor. I assume its from one of those carousel type drives where you pull the platters up and out.

Cheers

Looks like the IBM 3330, or equivalent 100 Mbyte 20 surface drive.

The head movement was powered by +/- 45V 20A supplies.

--

-TV

dl=0

In the mid 80's I operated a Wamg mini (still huge) with five

330 meg disk-pack drives.. when doing reorg (defrag today) they'd shake violently. Once they had a floor tile up and a drive fell in, still running fine. But if you bumped it too hard it would crash. Had a program that would kick the drive if someone was leaning on it.. get off me. Good times...

No, no no. You are a couple DECADES off. I'd guess, maybe, IBM 305 RAMAC, or something closer to that vintage. This is 1950's to early

1960's gear.

Jon

Have you ever handled one? I repaired some CDC's clones in the seventies.

--

-TV

It's hard to judge from the photos but I reckon definitely more 1960s than 1950s. My reasoning is that one didn't see rainbow ribbon cables until well into the 60s. Those diodes look more like those seen in 60s and tywraps didn't supplant lacing until 60s. It could even be made as late as 1970 as a late model of an older design.

piglet

The HP "washing machine" drives like this were 404MB, in use around

1982-86 to my knowledge, and had a similar mechanism. I have some of the parts. The voice coil was roughly 10cm in diameter and throw, the carriage perhaps 300g. The rollers run on a highly polished cylindrical rod of tungsten carbide, which I now use to sharpen wood scrapers :). I still have the drive power supply too, IIRC it's about +/- 40V and must be almost 2kW, it's a seriously large transformer and the two filter capacitors big enough to fit a wine bottle inside.

Clifford Heath

The original 3330 had two spindles of 30MB each (hence the 30-30 or "Winchester" nickname). I believe they came out with the S/360 in

1969, give or take.