One enjoyable facet of Nineteen Seventies-era arduous disk drives is that they’re large, clunky and are pretty simple to restore with out the necessity for a clear room. A much less enjoyable facet is that they’re Nineteen Seventies-era HDDs and thus previous and sometimes damaged. Whereas repairing a CDC 10 MB HDD for the upcoming VCF East occasion, the oldsters over at [Usagi Electric], this led to fairly a couple of struggles, even after a alternative 14″ platter was discovered to interchange the crashed platter with.

These CDC HDDs are known as Hawk drives, they usually make the related 8-bit Centurion  TTL logic-based computer systems a lot quicker and simpler to work with (for a Nineteen Seventies system, in fact). Regardless of the big measurement of the parts concerned and the straightforward, all through-hole nature of the PCBs, points that cropped up ranged from corroded DIP switches, to move alignment sensors, a faulty analog board and in the end a reported unhealthy read-write head.

Frustratingly, even after getting the platters to spin up and all the things shifting as supposed, it might appear that the remaining drawback is that of presumably unhealthy read-write heads, as in plural. Whether or not it’s attributable to age, earlier head crashes onto platters, or one thing else, assembling a working Hawk drive turned out to be considerably extra sophisticated than hoped.

We undoubtedly hope that the bunnies can get a working Hawk collectively, as working Nineteen Seventies HDDs like these are change into fairly uncommon.