On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 9:47 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

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I have a couple Macintosh external drives that aren't working properly.

I deal in Apple Macintosh SCSI drives. I (and others here) can give you some hints about making these run a while longer. Contact me after VCF-East and say hello at the show! I'll be a vendor.

I'd be interested in a conversation about Seagate ST1480N drives (found in some Quadras and in lots of Sun workstations as a "SUN0424" drive). I have a couple that work and a couple that do not. One HDA makes unhealthy "buzzsaw" noises and is likely a write-off. The other spins up then immediately spins down. I wonder if there's a rotation feedback sensor in the HDA that's not reporting correctly that's causing this behavior. I wouldn't mind being able to copy data from these drives but I know they were last used in the 1990s and the data on them was mostly the OS install and any user files were copied off long ago, but I doubt there's anything magical and wonderful to be found on them. Just getting one of them working again would be convenient. I don't have that many sub-1GB drives left anymore (I have lots and lots of Seagates and others in the 1GB-4GB range). -ethan