Nix McRetro
A video review of the horrors I had previously done to these innocent WDL-330P hard drives. Don’t worry, we’ll fix them and their counterpart floppy drives in the next set of videos. This series will take us right through until the coming weekend. So please, pull up a seat and enjoy the first video of the set!
Some people have an irrational fear of spiders or aeroplanes. Me? Surface-mount capacitors. Fortunately, that’s something I’m finally going to have to deal with, because these old hard drives are looking a little worse for wear.
I’ve got two spare WDL-330P 30 MB hard drives on the bench, along with another installed in the Sega TeraDrive. They’re interesting little drives, and although they’re getting on in years, they remain useful for keeping the original TeraDrive hardware going.
The two spares have slightly different labels and revision markings, but they’re broadly similar drives. Most importantly, neither appears to be suffering from the dreaded stiction problem I’ve heard about with some old hard disks. That’s a relief!
Now let’s turn them over and have a look at the circuit boards. Oh dear. Look what I’ve done to these poor things!
A few years ago I replaced some of their original surface-mount capacitors with ordinary radial electrolytics. The repairs addressed the immediate problem I was dealing with, but I’ve never been particularly happy with how they look. Those capacitors are perched on their little legs, just waiting for somebody to knock one loose and damage a solder pad.
I’ve now got the proper equipment and some replacement surface-mount capacitors on order, so it’s time to tidy everything up. I’ll also be doing the floppy drives, which have their own electrolytic capacitors hiding away inside. Nothing is ever simple with old computer equipment, is it?
There are some bad sectors on these hard drives, although they’ve been mapped out rather than appearing as an entirely new problem. That doesn’t make them magically perfect, but it does mean I can at least assess which parts of each drive are usable.
The TeraDrive itself has an XT-IDE setup that can accommodate much larger storage, so 30 MB isn’t exactly enormous these days. Still, there’s something rather lovely about seeing one of these old drives working alongside the machine it belongs with.
I’ve been trying to tidy up previous repairs before moving some of the collection along. I’d rather hand somebody a properly finished board than one with my old capacitor experiments hanging off it. Time to correct a few mistakes and make these drives presentable again.
There are three hard drives to work through, plus the floppy drives and several other bits of hardware waiting for attention. Looks as though we’re going to be busy for a while!