Test and try: Does this 40 year old Tandon TM-252 drive still work?

Tandon was bought by Western Digital. Before, WD only made controllers. They had the idea to integrate the controller on the drive electronics and connect the drives directly to the PC's bus via a 40-pin cable. They couldn't find a drive manufacturer to cooperate with them, so they simply bought Tandon for their drive manufacturing plant. All of WD's early IDE drives were 3.5" Tandon (TM262/362 or TM282/382) drives with a new PCB. So technically Tandon still exists, it's just named WD now :)

Tandon drives all sounded like that. That's NORMAL for them!! I remember those things from WAY back in my CompUSA days. They all sounded like they were hand-cranking a flywheel to start a WWII Tiger tank. Ah, memories!

WOW! 40 odd years later and the dang thing is not only still working but working perfectly!

Mark/Release was created to dynamically add/remove drivers and TSRs. First you do a MARK, then load driver1, then MARK, then driver2,etc. RELEASE unloads the last loaded driver/TSR up to the latest MARK, following reverse order.

SuperStor was drive compression software, a competitor to Stacker and Microsoft's DoubleSpace/DriveSpace. It was included in DR-DOS 6.0 and IBM PC DOS 6.3.

Adrian - the low performance with the 8-bit controller was in part due to the fact that you did not have the card's BIOS address shadowed in the PC's BIOS. When you use an ISA controller for your HDD with an EPROM, not enabling that will cause that.

In the words of my favorite wascally wabbit, "What an anti-kyu-ey!" Over forty years old and not a single defect on any sector. That's freakin' amazing, man.

That era of hard drive protocols was really interesting. ST-506 was intended for floppy and hard drives to exist on the same cable, some computers did use that method of attaching drives (I believe the PDP-11 did). The drive itself is dumb, and the control signals are the same as the floppy drive (the data lines are re-purposed for status). CDC used a very similar signaling method for their "Finch" hard disks and floppy disks, Usagi Electric has some really interesting videos on them. I compared the signals and there are a few pins swapped around but otherwise they are identical, so it's possible that they are either copied from each other or even more or less compatible on an electrical level.

"Mark" and "release" are programs to manage TSRs, mostly to unload TSR

Good lord, an MFM drive! I love the sound of those, I used to sleep right next to my old XT machine beginning of the 90's and found the sound very soothing. Low-level formatting took the whole night in those days. Good memories. Wish I still had one.

Hey Adrian, I hope you copied over the UTIL folder to your XTIDE before wiping the drive. Some of those programs are really interesting. Haven't heard of them before.

Wanna talk loud? The stepperband motor on my Amiga 500's 20mb HDD (non-standard, was kept in it's own box separate from the controller that plugged in on the side) was SO loud you could hear the heads accessing 2 rooms away! It was absolutely insanely loud. The whole thing sounded like a vaccuum cleaner motor going with a typewriter chittering overtop.

Adrian, I just bought a learn to solder kit and a bunch of little test projects off Amazon. Im in my 40s, but you can never be too old to learn a new skill right? Im starting from the ground up, basically directly due to your YT channel. I got tired of just watching, I want to learn how to do this too. At least a tiny bit. :D

That spin up sound and sound of the drive is almost ASMR-like….love the sound of spinning drives, floppy drives etc

Unlike Adrian I do actually enjoy the sound of 40 year old spinning rust!

It still amazes me how many discrete utilities had to be installed on early PCs just to keep the darn things running. We take for granted everything built in to modern operating systems and the massively improved hardware that "just works."

You should see if the original 8 bit controller has a built in low level formatting routine with G=C800:5 from DEBUG

Steve Gibson, the brain behind "Spinrite" has an interesting podcast called "Security Now". I think it's one of the oldest podcasts around, nearly 20 years with information about digital security.

Still working after all this time, salute to this spinning warrior.

The missing data happens because the magnetic domains move. For example if your have two north poles next to reach other they spread apart while a north and south next to each other will start to drift together. Even if the domains are still strong they're now out of alignment with the heads. If they aren't too far out of alignment doing a read and write (move files) to everything puts the data back right under the heads. SpinRite does this (plus other stuff). Doing multiple reads can sometimes get a good read and allow the software (with CRC checks) re-write the data again. Newer drives do a compensated write where they put the like poles closer together and the unlike poles farther apart. This also has to be compensated not only for bits in series but to the bits in nearby tracks.