This thing can backup and emulate MFM/ST-506 hard drives for your retro computers
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- Опубліковано 26 лип 2024
- The ST-506/MFM hard drive standard was pretty popular in the early 80s as a way to add extra storage to early computers. Many of these drives have long stopped working and finding something to work for the old computer isn't always easy. This awesome project lets you use modern equipment to replace the aging spinning rust with solid state storage.
0:00 Intro
0:56 Unboxing
7:01 MFM Hard Drive Archiver and Emulator
45:20 Conclusion and outro
A few systems it works for:
AT&T 7300, AT&T 3B1, AT&T 3B2
TRS-80 Model 16
Kaypro 10
VAXStation
PDP-11/23
--- Video Links
MFM Hard Disk Reader/Emulator (and order page)
www.pdp8online.com/mfm/
David's PDP8 website:
www.pdp8online.com/
5170 Series
Part 1: • IBM PC/AT Model 5170: ...
Part 2: • IBM PC/AT Model 5170: ...
Part 3: • IBM PC/AT Model 5170: ...
5170 Overclocking
Overclocking the 5170 motherboard:
• Mystery Box: Testing, ...
• Followup: IBM 5170 "ex...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
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Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
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Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
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TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
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TS100 Soldering Iron:
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EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
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DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
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Magnetic Screw Holder:
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Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
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RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
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Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
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Heat Sinks:
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Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
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--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - Наука та технологія
The sound of that hard drive spinning up and seeking brings back many fond memories.
The BeagleBone Black does have an audio output option. As well as a USB port.
Thus it's likely possible to make this sound like an actual ST-506 :)
Yes loved the sound of the disk spinning up - you used to be able to tell good from dodgy drives just by listening to them power up and seek.
I am glad it is not just me. I loved the sounds my drive made spinning up and initializing and still miss it.
Just when I think I've seen everything retro related, you show this mfm emulator. This is so fascinating and cool. So many talented people who refuse to let old computers die, and kudos to them. Thanks so much for another useful and awe inspiring video.
Brandon Taylor Well, there is the matter of what to do with those old dial-up modems
@@TheSulross Yeah, that's true. However I think I saw a device that let you connect old dial up modems to your home WiFi. But, what about the speed? And in which cases it would be useful compared to any of the "local" solutions to transfer data...
@@TheSulross Thanks for the chuckle. I confess I am torn between wishing those modems good riddance, and thinking that maybe they should be saved at least for museum usage.
@Brandon Taylor That sounds like pro-life computer movement 😎
"If the interleave is one step beyond..."
*Saxophone kicks in*
3:30 What a nice gift, straight from his big red heart.
LOL, I was thinking the same thing... wonder if Stewart watched Haachama Cooking as well 🤣
Shoulda rebranded it Harachnibo
at 3:28.. I got the same "vibe" that when someone sent a real radioactive ☢️ clock to @Fran Blanche
🥵🥵 >> ua-cam.com/video/0J3cu67SBZY/v-deo.html ... Actually.. a radioactive clock would have been better that this 🕷️"candy"🕷️ .. 🤮 ..
David’s MFM Emulator is like magic to me. That it can figure out the encoding from basically any encoder, dump that to a disk image, or host it back to the system… incredible!
I used to work in the IT department at a large University in the late 90’s. I can’t tell you the number of these drives we sent to the salvage yard or destroyed. This and old SunOS, Sequent, Digital, IBM systems. It was heartbreaking at first all this old solid tech, but truly there was nothing we could do with any of it. Some of my friends would gut out the old Sequent cages and use them as general purpose 19” racks, but the hard drives were hard to justify as anything. The rare earth magnets inside was the only thing anyone kept. These days I have mixed feelings about it all.
The one brand that's retained relevance from that era wrt legacy hardware, in both commercial and hobbyist use, is SGIs, but they're a realm of vintage tech of which few are much aware. Still used by textile manufacturers, medical comanies, defense companies, miscellaneous industrial processes and especially PCB manufacturers including TI and Global Foundries, plus a great many hobbyists.
This is the first ADB video that needed a content warning 😂
WARNING: Contains arachnids. :-)
Adrian! WHAT a kick! It was so cool to see that ancient copy of SpinRite actually running and cranking away... and, sure enough, confirming your suspicion that the 1:1 interleave was "one too tight" and thus being the WORST possible interleave for that controller. As you may know, I'm currently working on SpinRite v6.1. Remind me once you see that v6.1 is released and I'll be sure to send you a download link! WHAT a hoot! :) /Steve.
Awesome about 6.1! Yeah I have a stack of MFM and RLL drives on which I run Spinrite periodically to keep them all running tip top. I used the old Spinrite II back when I was in high school working at a computer store. I got many customer machines working again after running it overnight. Good memories!
This video is also a nice introduction to the MFM disk system. I learned a lot about them.
I do like how the old MFM drives sounds than they do seeking and parking routine
Adrian...I really hope that was the last of the insects that gets sent to you. I feel the same way you do!
Well, now we need a fixing video on the faulty controller card. Since he has another working one, it should be possible!
Amazing you still have an MFM drive. Looking at it brings back memories. Even that mention of the floppy/hd cable difference with the flip. That's how I used to recognize one from the other, since we had tons of them lying around. Nice work. 👍👍
I have all kinds of MFM drives, some 11-12 still working drives. Everything from ST125/ST-225/ST-251 over IBM full size 20 MB, Toshiba, Miniscribe, Epson, Rodime, even a Tandon 262. Amazing they're still alive! 😀
Didn't expect crossover to the PDP world!
I've used these MFM reader/emulators for the last 6 years (Since 2015), and I love them. I have about 8 of them now, all in operation on different machines in my lab... Thanks for making this very comprehensive video about them!!!
I think I need a compilation video with Adrian saying "wow it works!" excitedly for like 1 hour
Thank you so much for this treat of an episode, it brought back so many forgotten memories of old-school hardware from the late 1980s for me. I remember particularly the years 1989-1992 where I had the most interaction with similar cables, cards and harddrives. I had completely forgotten how good it feels to look back and realize how much the technology has changed since then.
I ran a BBS on an Atari 130xe using the Seagate ST-225 with an Adaptec ACB4000 controller, later a Xebec 1420. The equipment was right next to my bed at home. My employer sent me out to a training class and I had to stay in a hotel for two nights. Could not sleep because I was not accustomed to the silence!
Then later on I upgraded the drive to a Seagate ST-4096. What a big difference in the noise level. One good thing is the larger drive helped keep my bedroom warm in the winter. I still have the drives, controllers, the ICD Multi-I/O, and the computer. All of that stuff still works, but has not been powered up since 1996.
What a timely video! I just ordered on of these to replace the drive in my HP-9133 HP-IB drive.
Take a drink every time Adrian says Beagle Bone.
Holy crap! I have an ST225 SCSI version... Was in my Apple 20SC External enclosure. It still works, so I took it out to keep it working for a few more years, (Popped a relay driven auto head parking 320mb server HDD into the encosure... My Mac Plus SCREAMS with that drive hooked up!) but it is amazing to see another one of these drives, even if it's MFM rather than SCSI!
The Commodore 900 was a prototype "unix" workstation running Coherent. The case looks very similar to the Amiga 2000.
They were actually sold
Commodore AND UNIX at the same time ?!?
Was that the system that they used the NatSemi 32-bit CPU in that everyone became disappointed with? The Commodore engineers who moved over to Atari Corp originally were hot to use that chip in the RBP/ST until it proved to be inferior and they pivoted to the trusty 68000.
@@TheJeremyHolloway According to Wikipedia, the Commodore 900 was based on the Zilog Z8000.
The NS32016 got some use in UK academic settings, thanks to Acorn's coprocessor for the BBC computer, the related Acorn Cambridge Workstation and Master Scientific computers, and the Panos operating system that they wrote for it.
As a rough estimate, the 512MB of RAM on that BeagleBone is able to hold the complete contents of 3 of the largest ever MFM hard drives. And the CPU is able to emulate any system that ever had an MFM drive. This just illustrates the absurdity and greatness of emulation and hardware development all at the same time.
Nothing in the world of electronics sounds better than the ibm 5170 starting up dos 6.2 with disk compression enabled... It is hypnotic, and if you are doing your high school homework, can result in instant sleepiness.
That's just beautiful. My second computer had a pair of ST225s in it, the racket they made on takeoff I mean power up was glorious. Definitely a change from the TRS-80 that preceded it!
Ooooo!! I'm in the process of building one of these! I have a very special computer with some software on a MFM drive that needs immediate backup.
I'll get the popcorn and enjoy this video!
Since you're struggling with Candy Reviews, if you have a video that isn't long enough... perhaps you could tack a "Adrian's Candy Corner" to the end of a video. You could also potentially do them as UA-cam Shorts. I'm not a UA-camr myself, but I've seen lots of UA-camrs talk about appeasing the Algorithm Gods with shorts.
That disk emulator needs a speaker so it can make beautiful soothing hard drive music
Thank you for the fantastic and informative video. This item is the most ingenious gadget for retro computer I ever heard of. Absolutely amazing!!! I try to get one immediately also tell my colleagues in the museum about it. Greetings from Germany
What a cool little device! But, I personally /love/ the sound of old hard drives!
may be add a speaker :-D
@@blitzwing1 I can definitely understand why people would not like the sound, but for some reason I just really love it!
Just ordered two bare boards, thank you for letting us know about this cool device!
If I recall correctly, the twist in the large cable simply changes the drive selector so you wouldn't have to mess with the jumper on the drive to specify drive 0 or 1. IOW if both drives are jumpered as drive 0, the twist would change the selection for one of the drives to be drive 1.
You could instead have no twist at all and use the jumper on the drive to specify drive 1.
Came from Security now, this is such a cool channel
3:28 I think we’re going to need a bigger debugger.
I'd bet that it would taste better than an eraser!
Unlike DOS prompts, shells on GNU/Linux usually keep the history around, so you can search it for previous commands to avoid retyping it :-) (up arrow, or ctrl-r …)
Me pressing up a hundred times looking for an "ls".
Some really clever people coming up with solutions like this and others. It is great to see.
A good sync; sync; sync. Is usually good enough to flush the disk cache before pulling power.
When I saw the title my first thought was for my PC7300/3b1 as I know the ST4096 died a heat death. I would love to see the 3b1 vid!!!
Even i never ever handled a MFM HDD, this episode made me happy, seeing that old tech parts now can be replaced with new/working thus reviving very old computers. no gear should ever be trashed, just because one part fails at one point and 90% is still fine. I LOVE REPAIRS!!!
Seagate ST225 was famous for off track writes under changing temperature conditions. Alan Sugar of Amstrad took Seagate to court over it because he used it in his PCs (read his autobiography) and it pretty much killed all consumer confidence in Amstrad PCs.
I had one that died and I used the cover as a catfood dish!
Yeah they are in atari ST megafile 20:s and sh 205. Its a choice - format cold, use cold and let cool when it starts acting up, or format it warm, and let it warm up 20 minutes before booting every time you want to use the machine.
@@grossteilfahrer so, moral of the story, Seagate has always been terrible...
@@TheJeremyHolloway Yes, give me a Micropolis any day. We cried when they closed their doors.
Man, this brought back so many memories of working on these "old" systems. I had nearly forgotten all the eccentricities of those controller cards, drives, cables and software. I used spinrite daily along with some others that elude me now. What fun. I had a failing st 225 on my shop PC that ran for months and months with the cover off, since once in a blue moon, the read/write head would stick. LOL. Talk about HDD noise, try it with the cover off. I'm enjoying these videos. Ever use a book titled "the hard drive bible" to get drive specs on almost every drive made up to printing?
Had one of these in the early 90s and I loved it!
As a kid, the games distracted me from the whine of the HDD, but as an adult, I am definitely glad that my modern PCs are reduced to relatively quiet fans. Soon enough, though, I will be hearing those old sounds again, as I revive my own collection.
What I'd love to see added is the ability to drive the motors on the MFM drive while pulling the data off an SSD. That way, you get the best of both worlds. Solid state data storage and mechanical seek noises.
Heh so a little speaker and some sound playback hardware. It's all open source, so totally doable.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Speakers do not sound the same and even if you could make one sound the same as a specific MFM drive, different MFM drives sound different. I'm talking about physically spinning and seeking the old MFM drive but not relying on its platters for data. It would be pretty strait forward to keep them spinning if we could take them apart without fear of damaging the platters.
Phew! I thought the spider was going to be alive...
eeew, I couldn't even touch that bag ...
Stewart continues to be the hero we need.
This works surprisingly well and looks pretty full featured for an open source project. Definitely have to file this away in case I ever get my 5170 motherboard working.
I actually kind of like the sound of old MFM drives, although I can imagine it might get annoying if you're working on machines for hours at a time.
As for the tarantula, definitely not a fan! No way I'd consider eating it, so you're a braver man than me for saying on record that you'd eat it!
Indeed, especially the ST-251 is annoyingly noisy c".) However, when using drives like ST-125, ST-1100 or Rodime 3055, it's not that bad. The sound they make, is so exotic though... every single type having it's own distinct sound; I bet a real hardcore enthusiast is able to tell exactly which model it is by the mere sound of it. 😀
Sweet! I've been looking for one of these! I need to back up the HDD in my leading edge model D before it dies.
Very cool! I think I saw one of these in person recently in a Tandy 2000 if I am not mistaken. What a very cool and well thought out design.
Not only is it fantastic that some seriously talented people design and build products like this, but they even give you a BOM and tell you how to build your own. 🙂 Perhaps the best part of all these videos though, is that, considering how expensive or rare some things are, there are people out there who will happily just donate such items to a channel like Adrian's. Ok, I admit that whilst I'm very glad they do, I'm still just a little envious! 😉
Sadly, I couldn't make it to the gym today, but as an arachanophobe, the surprise edible spider got me all the cardio I could want. That. Was an experience. Mad respect to Adrian for handling that with verve. I'm not sure I'd be at all coherent if someone sent me a gigantic spider in the mail. I'd probably have to move. :)
I feel like Stewart is sending us a message: "You could have had nice, relaxing candy reviews, but you have chosen ... poorly." :P
When I was first building computers I had 2 st225 drives with windows 95
.. I had to reinstall all the time then I got a 115 mb ide drive and that was heaven ..thanks for the video!
What a cool piece of kit!
I have that exact same drive in your hand and it is a working drive. It was a drive that came with the very first 80286 computer that I purchased in 1990.
"Clyde, Scrap the taranchula!"
Love the emulator. The things they can do no days is Awesome!
Yep love that MFM drive noise for about 45 seconds and then I'm done with it too... Lol There is a reason for the saying ya got to love that jet engine... The 5 1/4 Scsi drives are the same way, sounds like a jet.. :-P
Thanks for the video!
LLAP
Put a modern enterprise Dell or HP desktop PC into diagnostics mode and if they have physical hard drives, they'll sound like jet engines in no time...
I wonder if the candy video problem is a UA-cam algorithms and not your awesome content keep it up love watching anything you produce
Channels that do regular videos and livestreams have to put their livestreams on a second channel because the algorithm tanks their channel if they don't.
Wouldn't be surprised if it's done the same there, since it's not related to tech (the entire focus of the channel) in the slightest.
Though, I'm sure a lot of people watching Adrian just don't care about candy reviews. They'll probably watch it if it's stuck in a normal video, but wouldn't watch a full on video about it.
Unfortunately i never saw the candy review in my recommendations and i suspect many others didn't either. Otherwise i would have watched! Sounds like UA-cam just didn't want them to happen 😔
Time to watch it.
3:27 Haachama cooking flashbacks... But will Adrian actually partake? Probably better if he doesn't.
I just like when whole universes actually join together.
awesome video :) this is a gamechanger for sure
Man it's about time, sadly about 5 years too late for me. Sold my whole collection. lol
Indeed... especially the ST-251 is a PITA to listen to. I use mine for backups only and rely on my 3.5 inch drives for actual use (that is, until I receive that MFM emulator, too... that's definitely a card worth purchasing!) 😀
Gosh, I am really looking forward to seeing that AT&T workstation revived :) I know you’ve got other projects currently and I’m not in a rush, but I loooove old UNIX, and that hardware is so unique! It’d be especially interesting if you could even remote-into it on your modern network.
I have used David's EMU to recover many MFM Drives, its a great device, he is very supportive of it, note, MFM drives have a "DRIVE READY" output the controller waits for before it tries to boot the drive, Sadly i don't have any of the videos up on my channel.
This came up on security now podcast giving a watch and a sub right now
That is a super cool product.
This project is so cool! A board that also replace the controller card would be even more interesting though! :)
Freaking cool, great video
3:28 imagine opening this as a birthday gift
at 3:28.. I got the same "vibe" that when someone sent a real radioactive ☢️ clock to @Fran Blanche
🥵🥵 >> ua-cam.com/video/0J3cu67SBZY/v-deo.html ... Actually.. a radioactive clock would have been better that this 🕷️"candy"🕷️ .. 🤮 ..
what an amazing find... so glad to see that emulation for trs-80 model 4p's works! This is a decent alternative to a FreHD which is produced by Ian Mavric.
Hardware Emulators and firmware Emulators to get mainframes to talk to servers. Fun. Brings back memories. :)
Very cool device. Just ordered one myself. And oh, I totally disagree about the hard drive noises :D I simply love them - it's just part of the experience of using vintage computers!
Thats amazing..i need one of those :)
well well my original 33 MFM drive I was using with my Amiga 1000 since 1989 just stopped working and this video came up 👍🙏🏻
The DEC PDP-11 was a right hoot to operate as was the DEC VAX750S.
I thought the candy reviews were crazy and now you're doing Tarantulas?! lmao!
Interesting though! I had no idea you could order freeze dried tarantulas to eat. :-)
I understand it to have started during the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and just stuck around as a performative-remembrance of the whole trauma.
Also, supposedly at least the legs have about the flavor & texture of shell-on shrimp.
I am excited for the at&t blogs
It would be really cool to get a small LCD or OLED and put it on the front panel of the drive to show the status of the BeagleBone
Cool stuff.
I saw one of these being used on a Tandy 2000 at the DFW Retro Computing meetup last month.
@Adrian Perhaps to solve the conundrum of deciding which computer to install the MFM emulator into, you could buy the bare board and components and make another video on that then install it into the 5170. I would honestly use the one you have and get the AT&T PC running since you made videos about the 5170 recently so you can keep the variety going.
I just might have to get one of these cards for myself so I can use the only MFM controller that I own.
Noisey is an understatement. I had one that sounded like a jet engine. It would also randomly stop, so you had to hit it on the top and it would start back up. An interesting few years of using that thing.
thank goodness that tarantula was packaged in 100x it's own weight in single use plastic.
Back in the late '80s early '90s I used to rebuild hard disks in a clean room. I remember the ST225 and ST251 drives and I think there was a ST270? which used RLL as its data writing method. I might have the model numbers wrong there as it was a long time ago. We used to replace the platters, heads, motors and re-write the servo. Low level and then high level format them in DOS for a boot and test. We had a dedicated machine to thrash the refurbished hard disks on (after a lengthy spin up soak test) before we stuck them on a PC for the final formats and testing. To lower the heads back onto the media we made head spacers out of clear plastic which we gently rotated with tweezers to lower the heads down. All this in a face mask and paper suit with cold filtered air being blown onto you at a rate of knots. The 3.5" HDDs with multiple heads and platters were the trickiest to do.
Im going to be honesty. I really enjoyed listening to Adrian squirm as he opened the tarantula LOL!
If I were you, I'd put the over-engineered MFM emulator into the over-engineered AT&T Unix workstation. Let AT&T Unix be reliant on modern Linux for its storage solution. It seems fair. Linux basically made all those old Unix servers obsolete. The least it can do is help an aging Unix machine live again.
IMO the "purity" of the 5170 is just a bit silly. The idea that these machines never had some other component in them, and you had to maintain some semblance of using all IBM parts is just... wrong. People have been upgrading, expanding, and putting new components in them since they were created. That's why IBM put slots in the computer.
it would be appropriate too as linux is essentially modern unix
yeah, as far as I'm concerned, getting the motherboard, the bios, and some original OS to boot is job accomplished; going original for storage is more like a fussy museum curator's hang-up
@@TheSulross I think that's a good way to frame this. If you think of the computer as something that just sits on a shelf to look pretty, having everything "original" is maybe a good thing to be concerned about. If you want the computer to live (This was Paul Allen's idea with the living computer museum), then you need to provide modern components so it can actually function.
I mean, does replacing the capacitors ruin the purity? The real question here is, what are "we" trying to preserve?
I would really enjoy a video of you building one of these in kit form.
Definitely sounds like something to get several of.
Hello Adrian
Thank you for presenting this Reader/Emulator. I'm refurbishing a old XT clone and have problems with the HDD/controller card. I remember my first HDD, which I bought for the Atari ST. The case looked like a shoo box and it was 10 or 20 MB. In my youthfull foolishness I decided to buy a 40MB HDD without being shure, it'll work… Lucky me, it could be low level formated and worked just fine. I remember doing several different low level format with different interleav factors.
But coming back to this board, it's a priceless value!!!
You where not shure, what connector J7 is good for. On the linked german site is sais: extension, not used in this application. So don't worry about it.
…and yes, keep up your great work - much obliged.
I saw a program where South American natives feast on the tarantulas, and they burn the hair off over an open flame, before consuming the spider. It is a real treat for them. Your mileage may differ. :-)
Great, now I'm picturing Adrian pouring a bunch of spiders into a blender and making a shake.
Now if only the card emulated the sound of the hard drive!
You can leave the old drive in the bay. Only connect power to the molex socket. This is what I' m doing on the 5150/5160' ies
@@crazyedo9979 sure you get the spin up and idle drive sounds, but you can't park the heads or hear the chunky seeking noises
Oh, that tarantula gave me Hachama Cooking flashbacks.
Same 😂
"not just this particular model".... I used to specifically collect ST-225s... they're slow but I'm convinced to this day that you could play football with them and they'd still be error-free.
So... now I've used that emulator for my Myarc Geneve 9640 with a Myarc HFDC controller for some time, the latter is supposed to support up to 134 MB per drive according to Myarc (up to 8 heads and 2048 cylinders), but a minor modification makes it work with up to 16 heads. There's a file system limit though, so the limit is at 250 MB per drive, i.e. half a gig with this emulator.
I was kind of excited since it was pretty much experimental; I'm not sure anyone have ever gone that high with the HFDC before, but it works absolutely perfect! Until then my largest drive was a 44 meg Rodime, which isn't too stable anymore by the way.
I'm equally impressed with this emulator and I don't regret for a second that I purchased that one from David... it's absolutely awesome how it works! 😀
>TRS-80 Model 4P
You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention...!
Epic!
I liked the website because it was completely old school with very basic HTML its fitting for what the products are for.
Can you tell it to "fix" the bad sectors on the emulated disk? That'd be neat.
This is an interesting board, and I can see having its uses (I guess being able to swap images could be useful) ! I have some actual Seagate ST-506 drives (5.25" full height 5MB jobbies) and ST-412 (10MB full height), plus the old ST-225 half heights and some others I forget, laying around somewhere in boxes, I haven't actually tried spinning them up in about 25 years from when I last tried them on an Acorn A440/1, I do recall they had some awful reliability (they were probably very well used by the time I got them in the late 80's early 90's too :)
Thinking would be dang funny to have such an emulation board, for if something was making a movie, or the like (or just to get the true feel of such a thing), which "includes" a speaker and emulation of the "noise" from the drive, for "real authenticity". lol
I think there are gotek firmwares that support fake drive noise
Another comment asked for that :)