smallest hdd capacity you have seen

[madhatter256]

I own an 800mb HDD that has Win95 plus tons of old army crap from army bases back in the early 1990s.

 

[JLK03F150]

In the early 80's I worked with a building automation system (BAS) call Johnson Controls JC-80. It had a 2MB HDD, a reel to reel tape drive & a paper tape reader backup drive. The HDD was about as large as a family sized watermelon. lol

 

[genec57]

The smallest I have owned was a 20 meg drive. The smallest I have seen was a 5 meg winchester drive that was about the size of a standard desktop PC and cost $5000.

 

[curtis1552]

Well, my first computer had 0 harddrive capacity, so I don't think it really counts, nor do the 512Kb 5.25 Floppies it used either. It was the venerable Commodore 64.

Second in line was an IBM 286 which I believe had a 20Mb harddrive along with a black and white CRT.

 

[tom10167]

6gb

hey you asked!

 

[mbigna]

you beat me hah.

here is another link to disk pack's
Here


my boss used to run jobs with them, he said they vibrated like washers haha

They were washing machines (in spin cycle) in size and operation. They should have never vibrated much, though. There were balancing mechanisms in place to prevent that. If they were left to vibrate, many bad things could happen--crashes really were crashes--of the heads and or platters.

Which also brings me to remember when 'mounting' really meant physically replacing a tape or disk pack by hand. There were people actually hired to do just that and only that.

Anyway--I have actually seen 5 MB Full height Winchester disks and the first hard drive I ever owned was a 20 MB full height Winchester that I mounted myself into a 4.77 MHz 8088 Heath/Zenith PC Clone that already had two 5.25" floppies installed. Unlike the IBM PC, the Heath/Zenith was designed to accommodate an internal hard disk from the get go. However, to install it internally, you had to physically remove the front panel of the drive (most hard disks of the time were built to fit into a 5.25" bay IN PLACE of one or two floppy bays. THEN you had to manually wire the HDD activity light directly from the DRIVE to the front panel (of the chassis) HDD activity LED.

 

[Chris_F]

20MB 5 1/4" half-height out of my IBM XT that I've had forever.

Also, a 500MB drive out of an old Macintosh.

 

[DocClock aka MadClocker]

10mb WD 3-1/2 full hight...still around, and my first PC was an IBM clone with a 386sx 16mhz with two 20mb half hight 5 1/4 mfm drives and a whopping 4mb ram...Played Duke nukem1 and Biohazard just great!
O/S= DOS 4 and win 3.1
Still love those old dos commands...remember typing all the exec's to get into your stuff? Fun Times

 

[JLK03F150]

O/S= DOS 4 and win 3.1
Still love those old dos commands...remember typing all the exec's to get into your stuff? Fun Times

I had a batch file menu that loaded on the C:\ when my old "clone" booted up. I also had several boot disks that preconfigured either himem, emm386, a combination of each, and even various RAM drives - some games were screamin fast running that way.

What I don't miss was figuring out how to create all that stuff the first time. Once it was all set up, then Fun Times ensued. lol

Remember the 'park' command before shutting down? pk.bat

 

[Michael Houtz]

Hehe, 40? Elitist. My first HDD was a 5 1/4 sporting a whopping 10MB's. I've actually had it up until few years ago when I decided I valued room more than nostalgia after all. Those were fun days tho. Nothing like trying to cram 1.2MB onto a 360kB floppy

the aliens put a 10mb device in my molar

 

[MattNo5ss]

Smallest I've seen is the 36GB 4200RPM HDD in my current laptop.

BEAST Laptop Specs:
Compaq Presario 2200
Intel Celeron M 1.3GHz Single-Core
Upgraded to 2x512MB RAM recently
Intel Extreme Graphics 2 64MB
15.4" LCD 1024x768

 

[CrystalMethod]

Think my first "hard drive" was a 20Meg.

 

[benscoobert]

I had an 80Mb 2.5 inch hard disk on my amiga 1200, it ran at 80k/sec on benchmark.........

 

[Roachgod]

The tape deck on my old gaming buddy's Atari 800. Man them days were the best.

 

[Roisen]

I think it was a 20MB Quantum Fireball from an old Gateway. Any or all of those facts could be wrong though.

 

[Surfrider77]

This is by no means the smallest, but ironically yesterday at work I had a drive failure in an old phone switching system used for call history backups. Got the 80lb processor unit open and saw 4 large memory boards each holding 4 banks of 16M ram. Couldnt believe how ancient the tech inside was.

So I pulled the bad HD out and today I am looking for a replacement. Turns out its the following:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...0000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US&reqPage=Legacy#

Seagate Decathalon
Capacity: 545.29 MB
Speed: 4500 rpm
Average Read Time: 12 ms

Not the smallest, but its crazy how this thing is inside a piece of equipment under millions of dollars of government contract in year 2009.

*edit*
Personally, I had a Commodore 128 growing up.

 

[EmAn]

I think my first was a 520MB out of an old Compaq. Ran windows 3.10 and played duke nukem like a beast.

 

[ratbuddy]

60 meg SCSI hardcard from Hard Drives International. Think it cost $200 or $250 or so. Seems they are long gone, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Crown has some funny info on one of the founders. Still have the drive in my old Tandy 1000 TX.

 

[MonkeyMhz]

Our family's first computer had a 100mb hard drive, I remember when I was 8 I ran out of space trying to install a game. Space was a constant struggle with it.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

My first HDD was a Conner 100 MB and then a Conner 240 MB.