Hard drive collection 2024 - Spin up/down of 497 hard drives from 10MB to 8TB, 1984 to 2023!

Some of you have been waiting for this for a while, haven’t you? Earlier this year I thought I would do a new collection video when I reached 300 drives… But this year was crazy and I’m just a few short of 500 now. Here’s the current state of my collection as 2024 comes to an end.

10MB to 8TB, 1984 to 2023, my collection covers a pretty large range of hard drive history, though it’s mostly focused on drives from the 90s and early 2000s. Last collection video was 45 minutes, but now the video is over 2 hours long!

I have sorted the drives by capacity and date, with the few opened "clear covered" ones being put at the beginning. The duplicate drives are grouped together making it easier to skip them if you don’t want to hear the same seek test multiple times (there's some drives I have up to 7 of)
The indicated capacity is as reported by speedsys for drives under 40GB (excluding some early SCSI ones), and advertised capacity for drives 40GB and larger.

I recorded all the drives by sitting my mic right on top of them, with the part picking up the sound sitting right above the stepper/voice coil of the drive.
I have decided NOT to amplify any of the recordings. It might make some of the more modern drives harder to hear but that’s on purpose, so you can hear how drives got quieter over time… That low noise output of modern drives is why I don’t really like to record them.

Note: I am aware of a small mistake in the video, the NEC D5PA-305008 is called healthy when the drive actually has 5 reallocated sectors (I did fix the PCB/HDA contact issue on it btw). I didn’t think it was worth re-doing a very long rendering to fix a minor error.
I guess there might be more considering the length of the video. I know that my older collection videos did have a few errors in them and I don’t know if people even noticed at all.

Interested by hard drives? Join my discord server! :)
  / discord