ahh, the HP 9133A - the largest and heaviest external 3 1/2" floppy drive ever built.

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@tubetime I was gonna say, that looks a lot like an OA-D3X drive!

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@mwichary @tubetime 70 tracks!

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@nblr @tubetime Probably regular disks? But the earliest ones (I think just the OA-D30V but I’m not sure) used disks with a latching shutter. https://www.jamiecraig.com/early-floppy-disks/

I’m pretty sure there was never a flippable 3.5” disk.

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@tubetime I think the 26-pin interface is actually just Sony’s original interface. It’s also on the D30/32’s used on the ACT Apricot.

[dantalion@fosstodon.org]

@tubetime Neat seems HP was a fan of Sony drives, My HP1653B logic analyzer also has a Sony drive with HP specific interface though that one is 3.5 inch

[ball@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@FurryBeta @tubetime 20MB, sister to the 40MB ST-251. I really liked them though the bearings certainly got noisy over time.

[furrybeta@shark.community]

@ball @tubetime That they did. They also had this habit of, after several years of service, a need to push on a corner of the face plate (upper right, iirc) to get the drive to spin up. Not sure what this torqued by a few thousandths, but it was enough to keep it working! The tricks one learns

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

@vk3kri yes

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

on to the surprise hard drive. but, no surprise, it won't spin up and pulls a bunch of current on 12v. hmmm.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the motor won't move. I think it is stiction. ugh.

[chuckmcmanis@chaos.social]

@tubetime Dude, that is the OG Hard Drive there, ya gotta respect what it heralded in the years to come. I mean sure, you can get a short M.2 drive today that holds as much as a million of those drives could but hey, on a minicomputer or a CP/M system, it was So Much Space!

[scruss@xoxo.zone]

@tubetime are these from the time that 3.5" disks had shutters with rounded apertures, and the shutters latched open? I remember some of my Dad's HP kit was like that

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

yeah all the heads are stuck. trying a heat gun now...

[darryl_ramm@hachyderm.io]

@tubetime

Hola AMIGO.

[yngmar@social.tchncs.de]

@tubetime Tap on the side with a hammer often sorted that.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

it spins, but it sounds bad. not much hope for this drive, unfortunately.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the Gesswein MFM emulator was able to capture a flux transition dump! i used their mfm_util to analyze it, and it is a very odd format: check out the command line:

--format EC1841 --sectors 32,0 --heads 4 --cylinders 153 --header_crc 0x0,0xa00805,32,4 --data_crc 0x0,0xa00805,32,4 --sector_length 256

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

example output of the analyze command... some bad sectors, but a lot of good ones!

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

output of 'strings' shows some cool stuff!

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the HPIB verification program for the HP5005B signature analyzer. wild