Give your floppy PC a Hardcard in 10 minutes - 1986 Plus Hardcard 20
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- The Plus Hardcard made adding a hard drive to a PC easier than ever. It was widely imitated, but none were as sleek as the original. Few are still functional after 35 years, but this one is, and I install it in my IBM PC and try it out.
Time flow:
0:00 Hard drives weren't easy
0:48 Introducing the Hardcard
2:06 Knockoffs
3:40 Installation
4:54 Drive technology
5:34 Powerup
6:33 Formatting
8:04 Testing
9:37 Later Hardcard models
10:42 Failure & repair
View or download the Hardcard manual here:
www.amstereo.org/files/hardcar...
#msdos #pc #retrogaming - Наука та технологія
When your 35 years-old design looks more sleek and elegant than your beefy graphics card.
Those old cards also have a standard length too (and fitting support in the PC case), so no sagging.
it's not a GPU -- that'd be like comparing a banana with an uzi
@Atari Warrior yeah the amount of thermal mass required on modern gpus is why they are so massive.
@@russianvideovlogguy still looks better
There will probably come a time when future graphics do get as slim as a hardcard (I still have a Hardcard II XL+ 50). And obviously more powerful than current videocards. Nanometer process may have to get smaller even more to reduce amperage further down. Maybe fabrication arrival to pico? Then it maybe needs some new cooling method, because traditional rotating blade fans are also what makes graphics card bulky, in addition to heatsinking. Perhaps we will see future cards with the Frore Airjet cooler, which is a new pioneer technology that does not use fan blades. It is flatter as heck & a little more compact for maybe the same amount of wind it can produce compared to a round fan. On top of that, future graphics may also use some smaller cooling with water, vapor, or TEC, which all that still are considered bulky right now, except maybe for the TEC, as current graphics water blocks are also still as clunky. Things will get smaller & smaller, as we have seen since the room-sized computers of the 1950's. We might even change to optical computing & superconduction materials (such as in transistors), both that can create less heat.
The concept of a hardcard has comeback in a way in modern machines with m.2 storage. They also made hard cards for the Apple II using 2.5" notebook drives!
Great video, and thanks for the plug! I indeed have an original 1985 10MB that appears to be a dealer demo example installed in my 1985 Compaq Portable. I was able to repair the drive by tearing it apart in my damp, dusty New England basement and estimating the OD of the original grommet, then building up a new grommet using heat shrink tubing - four years later the sucker still runs, reliably, with no bad sectors! Wish I had a 20 mb unit as I filled the damn thing up already…
Time to upgrade your system. Ha, ha, ha, ha.... ;-)
I have always loved the sound of any hard drive spinning up.
For anyone wondering, part of the Plus Hardcard's low profile comes from the drive's logic being on the same board as the controller. It's here that the bulkier competing hard cards had the advantage of using a standard drive, which could be swapped out easily for something better.
I found one years ago in a thrift store. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
It actually Is pretty impressive they could make it that thin with the hard drives of the time.
As a younger generation of computer geek, I've only learned about these in the past few years, but it definitely seems like a very ingenious concept. And looking at the sales figures for the 20 MB hard card, clearly there was a need in the marketplace if that many were sold. The closest thing we have to this now is some m.2 SSD cards, but those are effectively little more than a breakout board.
These things were not very popular for anything but an early 286 or an 8088/8086 machine. Early hard disks in PCs were MFM or RLL and used a lot of power. Nearly all of them were 5.25 as opposed to 3.5. They also required a controller and some knowledge to install them and set them up. Installing an IDE drive is MUCH simpler than installing a brand new MFM or RLL drive.
But around the time of the 386, IDE (ATA) became a kind of de facto standard (even though IDE itself is not de facto). I am entirely unaware of any 5.25" IDE drive. By the time the 386 was out, having a hard drive was a must. Most 386 machines, probably close to all, shipped with a hard disk and either an integrated controller or one in a slot. I retired quite a few machines (probably over 1000) with either no hard disk, an MFM or RLL drives or a hard card.
@@christo930 The quantum Bigfoot drives were 5.25.
@@christo930 Compact put out a 5 1/4 hard drive for 386 to pentiums. It was called the Big Foot. It was 1/4 height, but it fit in a 5 1/4 bay. It was a bad drive that would often fail during warranty.
@@KanawhaCountyWX Yeah, I forgot about them. Funny thing is, I have one.
@@HavocSun There was also a compatibility issue with them. When they were still around in the Pentium era, the company I was working for was standardized around the Deskpro 2000 Compaq desktop. Every single bigfoot drive had to be swapped out. I don't remember the details, but there was an issue with NT, which was one of the standard desktops (a lot of these computers had triple boot NT/OS2/Windows 98.
you can make a pretty decent "clean room" box with some long gloves and some polycarbonate plus other necessities to make a latching lid and adding high static pressure fans and very fine hepa filters for not a lot of money. it's the problem of having that run for like 15mins prior to doing your work that can make it a rather time consuming process, and you need to be sure you have every single tool you need at your disposal inside the cavity once you're into the thick of it. having an air bulb to spritz the drive out after completion is also a handy idea. Remember that a clean room isn't completely free of dust contamination but it's pretty darn close. any dust that does get inside the drive is usually able to be dislodged and spun away from the platters anyway.
The video I saw of one of these being repaired was in bbishoppcm's basement a couple years back. While they're a neat item, I too agree that most attempts at rejuvenating these with different material is only a stopgap fix and shouldn't be trusted regardless of if it was done in a cleanroom environment or not. It's a lot simpler to just go get an XT-IDE card (ideally one that has slot 8 support) and shove an IDE DOM on the back.
My IBM PC came with one of those when I bought it, and it was originally working fine just like yours. It pretty quickly started making strange noises and popping up errors, though, and finally lasted just long enough for me to build an XT-IDE card and back up its contents to CF. I'll bet if a HardCard hasn't been used in a while, it takes a little time when you start using it again for the rubber stuff to spread around and get the heads stuck. I think I did try repairing mine since what did I have to lose? But I no longer have it, so I must have failed, and probably gave it to the junk guys when we moved my house. They are really cool cards, though. I don't think I had ever actually seen one before buying my PC, and I was surprised at how elegant a solution it was for mid-80's computing. High-end stuff from those days still feels high-end, though.
The Computer Chronicles!!! one of my favorites of all time!!!!😎
I had no idea the Hardcard was so innovative. A 1" thick voice coil drive in 1986??
It *should* be a compromise because of the form factor, but instead it had to have been one of the fastest and most modern consumer hard drives of its time. Very cool.
I googled the previous user of that disk and it seems he passed away last fall. I think it's him, as name matched and he worked for Westinghouse. He would've been in his mid 50's when last using this device.
Pour one out for our now departed oldschool nerd homie 😢
@@gregx5096 Bit rot gets us all, in the end!
I love your presentation for any given piece of hardware. Here is what it is, what it does, when it was relevant, who it was for, how the next few years after release would treat it, and here are some answers to some questions you may have about it. Excellent work, as always.
I find the concept of the hard-card fascinating just because it's something that's come full circle. Right now there are SSDs that plug in to PCIE slots, while obviously the technology has improved significantly, the principle of a storage drive attached via an expansion slot card is making a comeback.
6:27 If you Google Michael Bulkley Westinghouse Electrical Company, you will see his obituary. He died November 2022, age 84. He was a technician (Navy veteran and Army reservist.)
On the subject of the speed of these devices, one thing that shocked the first reviewers of the first Acorn Archimedes with an ARM2 processor in about this era (c. 1987) was that this was their first experience of hard discs being accessed at their full maximum theoretical speed without interleaving, and still with plenty of cpu cycles to spare. Moreover, it accessed 3.5-inch floppies at about double the speed of a DOS PC, again close to the theoretical maximum. This was an 8 MHz machine, where the cpu consumed less than one Watt of power. I think VWestlife would love the funky design if he could get his hands on one.
Unfortunately they used rechargeable cells for the RTC...
@@TheUAoB Not on the original Archimedes A3xx machines: these had a Duracell AA alkaline cell for the RTC and CMOS RAM. They leak, of course. Later machines such as the A5000 did have a rechargeable cell; however, I cannot remember the details.
@@cdl0 The last machines did too, my Risc PC had the battery explode and cause catastrophic damage. I found out when I took it from storage to cut it out.
I just assumed the earlier models suffered in the same way, I guess there's some other reason why the original design machines are so rare now. I just looked on eBay, where an A440 is asking £1500! Lots of the early 90s A30x0 models though.
@@TheUAoB That's a pity about your Risc PC. They were very nice, and had a really funky design. I hope you managed to repair yours.
@@crawfishbuffett665 In 1987, the ability to execute one instruction per clock cycle at 8 MHz was impressive, and such low power that passive cooling was sufficient.
HA! I was just watching that episode of computer chronicles with the hardcard segment yesterday....awesome
Your editing in this video is perfect. The information level is great. Very well done!
Wow, so many memories in this one. A pleasant memory of the hardcard we bought in the late 80s. The painful memory of DoubleSpace. DoubleSpace never ate my data, but it used up so much RAM and processor power. One of the most difficult viruses to remove too.
One of these was my first ever computer upgrade. Paid for with my own money for our family computer as a kid. (A used 20 MB Quantum HardCard.)
I'm just shocked your Hardcard still works. I've never run into a functional one over all these years. I even had a NOS one that was dead straight out of the box.
This brings back memories. I got a HC20 as a hand-me-down from work and placed it in my PS/2 Model 30 (another story). Instant upgrade from twin 720k floppies! Until it died as I was expecting it eventually would. The drive and the manual are exactly what I remember!
Old tech have this charm that I can't figure out what... They always attract me like a fly to a zapper😊
I actually had a couple Hardcards a long time ago, and I think even one of the "knock-offs." (Possibly sported a twice-as-tall WD drive, but I'm not sure.) I remember the interface between the PCB and drive of the Hardcare had three fun-named connectors -- rotor, motor, and encoder. (It looks like from your card and Googling images that they're under that separate plastic cover between the drive and PCB, so I guess they're normally not visible.)
The Hardcard itself had no activity light, which especially back on a PC/XT you really wanted to know that it was doing anything versus just frozen, but as you demonstrated they'd put a little '+' symbol in the upper right hand corner of the screen if the drive was being accessed. This was better than nothing, but you were stuck with this only working in text mode as I recall. Anyway, I remember eventually figuring out I could attach an LED to one of the drive connectors (I forget which one) and it would work as a basic activity light. I imagine whichever one it was I figured out was being used by the head movements. It worked most of the time although every once in a while would get stuck in a persistent flicker.
Impressive, never know it exists. Pretty flat for the time, very nice. My first harddrive was a Connor CP4000 (as I can remember) with a black aluminium top cover and had a whopping 40MB of storage capacity. It was also very flat and a very silent drive, I was very happy with it and never let me down despite others crunshed on the reputation of Connor drives. Years later when the drive was replaced with serveral versions of a Quantum Fireball with more capacity and Stacker (the tech MS copied as DoubleSpace) came around, I did an experiment installing Windows 95 onto this 'Stacked' 40MB Connor drive and it worked haha - with 0% storage left! I need to mention that it is only possible to run Win95 with a secondary drive to store the swap files because there is no room left for the 'unStacked' swap files. The Stacker/DoubleSpace technology was very impressive. Ah, memories! ;-) Thanks for the interesting subject and video!
Never knew about that blinking symbol. Iam from 1983. But never have seen this back in the day. Learned something to day.
Those systems were built like tanks. Weighed like one too.
I think i distinctively remembered seeing a 20MB version of it advertised around 1990-91 in New Zealand's computer magazine... Price is around 200 to 400 I think
I used a 20mb in a 8mhz xt clone in college from 85 to 89. I loved it since i had 2 full height floppies
I cannot get enough VWestlife videos. You don't have gimmicks just straight info and demos. Thank you!
“Michael A. Bulkley, age 84, passed away peacefully in his home in Ocean City, Maryland on Wednesday, November 2, 2022. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, he was the son of the late Eugene Bulkley and Alice McCormick… After traveling with the military, and moving with his first wife Rosalie, and 3 children, 10 times in 10 years, he joined Westinghouse/Northrup Grumman working for the Department of Defense, and became a radar specialist.”
I remember these. The computer store I worked at back in the day sold them.
the "Hardcard" branding is so on point
I am so happy my 20MB MFM HDD has no singel Bad Sector until now. But that HartCard is so a great Thing.
I actually remember those. I never had one or saw one myself, but I recall the ads and the magazine articles. In particular, I remember reading that salesmen found it very handy to bring their software system and drop it into a PC at the prospect's office, and they don't have to install anything, or un-install to clean up the system.
Remember, a complex package came on a stack of floppy disks. There were no optical discs or other high-capacity format.
Great technology for the time. I had no idea they existed. Thanks, VWestlife!
Very cool, nice to see this one still works! For something that stays inside the PC, it still looks quite modern! Didn’t know much about these besides that they existed, but this was a great overview. I’m sure this upgrade helped out a lot of PCs!
I still have my Hard Card II XL Plus, 50 MB version, probably bought either at Frys or Incredible Universe. Feels like I got it in the mid 1990's, or maybe late 90's. Mine still works & still has stuff on it. Currently mounted on my overclocked 25 mhz 286 system.
Thanks for the fond memories. I used to repair these back in the day.
Oh the memories of The Computer Chronicles on your local PBS station. Such memories, of course there is now a youtube channel of their content.
I had something similar in a five-slot IBM PC that I put together from parts in '86. I helped a friend with some software development for his VAR business and he paid me with a 32 MB hard card. I still have that PC and it still works.
I prefer the Softcards personally, there more flexable 😉
Michael Bulkley passed away at the age of 84 in 2022. He passed peacefully in his sleep at his home.
Nice 2 videos in the same week! And one about HDD love your video Kevin you're the best !
I got that same Commodore hardcard in my A2500. Same Quantum drive and everything. Still works, too.
Back in the day, on the drive cards we installed (the WD FileCard 30 looks familiar) in those plastic Amstrad PC1512's we would low level format them by loading debug and using G=C800:5 to access the cards firmware. This may have been more to do with showing off rather than doing anything useful.
one of my buddies did like a window on one of his harddrives years ago, no clean room but the trick that seemed to help was using a clean bathroom and running the shower to steam it up first, then cool it down by running it cold a bit. Seems to cut down on the dust in a similar manner to when im painting something and spray the room down with water first
It's like the granddad of the modern PCI-e storage cards that carry a bunch of M.2 drives
I had one of the Hardcard 20's in a Compaq Portable III Expansion Chassis. I used it to keep my work files on. Worked like a champ, no issues. Funny that this was the 'best' way to upgrade the HDD capacity in an existing PC at the time!
Great research, editing and presentation. I always learn something here. Much appreciated.
Awesome. I owned this exact drive back then. Love hearing it start up
Thanks for sharing this. These drives are becoming increasingly rare and I've never seen one in the UK. Maybe one day!
The main innovative thing of the original hard card was that actually Quantum designed the hard drive especially for this card so they needed only the spinning platter, motor and heads - all controlling was done on the PCB next to it. This allowed a thin deaign. The big pain point was that you couldn't replace that hdd in case it broke. The copycat allowed this if course as they used off the shelf HDDs.
I don't think I can say more about your videos, Kevin. I love them all, you make my days better with each single new video upload, and you keep being an amazing guy that I'm lucky to klnow in this world. Thank you for everything! ♥
Nice piece of history that i didn't know
I started fixing PCs in the early 90s, and Hardcards were the bane of my existence. They would crash the heads if you looked at them funny.
The first time I encountered something labelled as a "HardCard" was an addon lump attached to an Acorn computer back in school, being late 90s it was unusual to me, but schools of that time here in the UK were still stuck using very out of date acorns when the computing world had settled on DOS-type PCs and apples of various odd colours... :S
The common CompactFlash card adaptors used for replacing old failed hard drives are technically the successor to the Hardcard concept.
The PS2 had space inside to be able to retrain both floppies and a hard card. Mine was a 40Mb HC. Double the size going at the time!
We tried installing a hard card with the assistance of our computer store owner friend. It tied him in knots for several days and did not work reliably even once installed. I think in the end we either gave up one floppy or went to an XT. Can't remember. Just remember the hard card fighting my Dad and his friend all the way.
Interesting theory that DOS 6 may have been the death knell, but I would blame that on "the clones" instead. Here's how I see it:
By 1993, the 3.5" IDE HDD form factor was pretty well adopted, as were IDE controller cards, making a whole storage solution in a card redundant. That in and of itself is probably enough to kill the product class. But, also...
With clones, the case wasn't always 100% to spec with IBM's PC/XT case design -- to put it mildly. Notably, it may not fit in the length available, or there may not be a supporting bracket to hold the back end of the card. Particularly important when it's a rear-heavy card in an upright orientation, like a mini tower.
When I got into computers, the 386 was king, and it was quite a while before I learned that these cards even existed. It was many years later before I learned what an IBM 5150 was, and what it looked like inside, and then it seemed pretty obvious to me why hard cards weren't "a thing" anymore. :-) They were a product designed for a specific computer, and nobody used those anymore.
Great video & detailed research, thanks
You're right about their reliability 35+ years on. Of the 5 or 6 I've come into contact with in the last 10 years or so, exactly zero were still working.
never hear of this before, very interesting and wow how sleek it looks for the era and still do today
My first hard drive was in this form, Christmas of 5th grade, 1991. It had a Conner IDE 40 meg drive that went nicely in my Amstrad PC1512DD.
0:49 that guy has a SERIOUS comb over! I remember hardcards, I don't recall them being stupidly expensive in comparison to standard HD's either, but could be wrong!
I barely remember these but I know people who used them. Thanks again for a nice flash back. You do great work.
These harddrives are mentioned in the YT-video "The Computer Chronicles - Windows 3.0 (1990)" at 26:10.
The main problem with the HardCard, is that there is Low Level Format tool available for it anywhere. So even if you repair the broken rubber and manage to get it back to a working condition, if your Sector 0 is dead, there are no known way to LLF it, which means it's a doorstopper.
at 03:00, and there it is. Yep. I worked for Tandy once-upon-a-time. My greedy little hands at CUMBERLAND Terrace had this pass through my fingers. Lucky customer.
I had a 40MB version of that when i was young. Bought it used in (i believe) 1995 for cheap. I only bought it for the disk drive as i was putting together a 386 computer with the little money i had. Used it in its original form once or twice before removing the hard drive and connecting it directly to the IDE card.
how times have changed. Nowadays, you get a pcie card, and add a bunch of m.2 drives to it, to do essentially the same thing.
Thank you for the trip to the past! 👍
I was expecting it to be like 5MB. Very compact for the time.
SYSDYNE! was the in-house brand for ComputerLand stores. It wouldn't surprise me if it was actually OEMd from some other company.
As Spock was known to say:
"Fascinating."
that is a really nice deign. I am impressed with the size, given the time frame.
God I'm feeling old....I remember this stuff....
"We'll begin by looking at an incredible new device that's a hard disk on a card. And it's called..."
me: "...A Card Disk?"
"The Hardcard."
me: "..."
Tandon calling their version the "Diskard" was a real facepalm. Someone should've discarded that idea.
I installed quite a few of these between 1990-92 when I was working in a PC repair shop here in the UK and they were very popular upgrades during that time! I think almost all of them over here were badged as file cards rather than hard cards (from memory anyway) and most of them were rip off clones 😁 Typically an MFM or RLL drive and controller combo on them and when IDE came along they seemed to lose popularity pretty fast!
Hi, i always wanted one back in the car when i had my Turbo XT - i bought a 6 month old used 10meg hdd the original owner was upgrading to 20meg, i thought "how cold you possibly use all that space" i filled the 10meg with dos, some small games, xtree, turbo pascal, quickbasic, telix or some other comms package at the time and i had room left over
wow I can't believ you found one!
I haven't thought about one of those in decades at this point. It was a neat idea, but pretty expensive for what it was.
I had one of those in a Compaq portable.
What killed the hard card was the widespread adoption of IDE as a controller for a PC hard disk. Beginning with the 386, most computers were shipping with a dual IDE controller built into the MB or on a card. Also, IDE drives tended to use less power than the old MFM and RLL drives in widespread use in the 80s so killing the power supply was far less likely.
Well only late 486 machines (1994-95 era) had integrated IDE controllers on mainboard. The main reason was price, and widespread hard drive adoption in general
@@michvod Well, turns out 486s, especially the DXes, made sense in the mid-1990s, as the Pentium was expensive and was suffering the "FDIV" bug.
When I bought my IBM PS2 30/286 I chose not to buy the optional IBM hard drive (because it was very expensive and notoriously slow). Instead I bought the Hard Card II 40 which worked so much better. Later on I replaced it with the 105 XL. I still have my PS2 but I sold off both cards (wish I hadn't now). Good memories.
Just had a major surgery today. Glad I got to come home to a west life vid :)
I have seen these in an LGR video but he said it in passing. He said something along the line of they constantly die from his experience. Not throwing any jabs at LGR, just happy that you went into a bit more detail
Perfect outro
Even a modern hard disk makes the same noise if you listen close enough. 😊
I question that "automatic head parking" feature.
When I was a teenager, my uncle gave me a Compaq Portable that had one of these Hard Cards in it, the 20 MB version. It didn't work, it wouldn't spin up. I extricated the card from the machine and removed the drive lid to find that the head had quite literally fused to the platter. Even gingerly trying to lift the arm up wouldn't budge the head. So I used more force and the head literally ripped a chunk out of the platter coming out.
To this day, I have no idea how the head managed to become that stuck. Back then, the drive was probably 14-15 years old. Today I have drives that are 30+ years old that even when stuck were never near that level of fused.
I never had occasion to use one of these but I do remember magazines like Personal Computer World had loads of full page ads for them.
I have the 10MB version in an old machine that refused to spin up. I spun the whole unit by hand about the same axis the platter would normally spin, and that was enough to get it to unstick for a while and read all the data off of it. I'd suggest doing that if you want to recover the data. I wrote a custom program to image the drive over a serial cable sector by sector during COVID quarantine.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd (latterly Panasonic). One of many companies who manufactured and distributed floppy drive units for IBM type computers.
I had a HardCard II 40 in my first PC (a Compaq Deskpro 386s/20) as a second to the built in 20Mb Connor (IIRC) hard drive. Worked great.
I have not worked on an XT in years.
That Tandy one was way thicker lol.
That's so cool.
I'm remembering how amazing it was to have all that fast storage space instead of the large floppies
I remember when hardcards were all the rage, it was just such an easy upgrade.
Not peeking st someone else's personal files: you, sir, are cricket.