I was programming already in the mid 80s and helping my dad figure out 20MB "Winchesters" in the late 80s/early 90s.
The Wren VII was the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drive with a capacity of 1GB or more — at 5.25” full height. The company had done a commercial-grade SAS drive based on the same chassis the year before. You had to be super careful with those magnets — they could cut off a finger, if you weren’t looking. And they were virtually impossible to remove from a fridge, once applied.
My job was to write a software system that could be used to monitor quality control issues in the manufacturing line, towards a goal of continual process improvement. I didn’t manage to get the whole management system built before I left, but I did get the full toolkit built, and the management system was intended to be a relatively simple layer on top of the toolkit.
Fun times!
Oh shit.
Damn. I don't have grandkids yet but ok.
I didn't come to HN to confront my own mortality and age ;P
Those aren't museum artefacts, it's just retro.
Get off my lawn.
>hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
HDD still do, but the flash on the controller quietly handles sector sparing, and remapping. This is why one can't just swap unmodified controller PCB anymore for data-recovery without secret vendor software. =3
Some, not all, harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb when trying to do data recovery on a drive with a faulty circuit board.
It is not that simple, as the identical part number may have a lot# with slightly different PCB/chips/firmware. If folks have done forensic recovery, than they get a rather quick education about the constant changes to retail HDD design. =3
That way when it was formatted, you could take it upstairs and the weaker magnetic field meant the disk's magnetic structure was stronger so it could be read.
This also caused the early-days meme of computer geeks being "basement dwellers".