Today I “retired” an old external drive from a sun machine at work. It was starting to show bad sectors and I/O errors so I set off to replace it with something newer. When I got the old external drive down to the lab I decided to rescue the SCSI enclosure as they are often useful. When I opened it up I saw a full height monster of a drive, the Seagate Elite 3.
The elite 3 dates back to 1992, at the time 2.9 GB of space would have been an amazing amount. I had 850mb in my new pentium 75mhz machine in early 1996 and I thought that was quite a bit. Skip ahead to today, it’s amazing that a drive like that can survive for that many years, in production! It has 11 disk platters inside and weighs an amazing 7.9 lbs!
Imagine a drive of similar size but with today’s perpendicular recording, I’m sure you could cram several TB in the same form factor. This elite 3 will make a great desk item for my office.
