Today I'll be having a look at the ever-shrinking, spinning mechanical hard disk,
and I'm starting with the three-and-a-half inch size. If you're around in the mid 80s,
and you saw this get invented, after the 1960s and 1970s sizes you would have thought,
'well that's tiny'. We're actually going to be using this as a reference for the smaller ones.
Right at the end of the 1980s, a new size was developed that caught on. The two and
a half inch. As you can see, it's really quite a bit smaller. The two and a half still lives
on today. The interface got updated with Serial ATA, and then when SSDs came out,
they continued the two and a half inch size. All right next size comparison is the two and a half,
too at some point in the 1990s was the 1.8 inch hard disk. We've got one here. These drives first
became highly popular when Apple decided to use one to manufacture their iPods. So the form factor
of the iPod was in part determined by the size of the 1.8 inch spinning hard disk, and Apple
continued to use spinning hard discs for quite a while. I have another one here. This is another
1.8 inch. But we can see we've got a different connector on it, and Apple continued to use these
drives for many generations, Here we have another Apple one. This is a 18 gigabyte. It's unusual to
see a product with both the Samsung logo and the Apple logo on at the same time. But there you go,
and once again when solid state drives came out they kept the 1.8 inch spinning disk size
mentioned on the outside. And so there's the ZIF connector. OK so we're going to move these two
out of the picture. As far as I'm aware, all of these other drives here are fully functional. But
the Samsung Apple drive is faulty. The bearings sound terrible and it won't read or write any
data. Which means I can take it apart and have a look at the mechanism and then power it up with
the mechanism open and have a look. OK it's coming apart, does have a bit of a rubber seal around it.
And a hidden screw. All right, let's try removing this see if that helps.
There it is one hidden screw and we have the inside. So I've got the mechanism open. Now,
I want to power this up, and to power this up, I'm going to use the interface mechanism
from a 1.8 inch hard drive external caddy. OK, so we're just going to find that connector and
use a lot of force to get this zero insertion force connector in. You've
got to push hard. OK that's in. Close the door. OK we've got our interface connected,
and I've got a Mini USB plugged into a computer at the other end. We've got power and nothing else.
Let's have a poke around. OK, well,
we can see the actuator arm moving the heads across the disk and trying to read something.
OK that's the mechanism. Powered off. I'm gonna put this back together for now. Just with that
one screw. So for comparison, we will have this Samsung Apple Drive here, And we'll move to the
next size down. Which is reasonably well known and that's the one inch Microdrive, and there we
have an Apple logo. So this gives away where this came from. So when Apple wanted to shrink their
iPod down even further and they made the iPod Mini, which is a bit smaller. This one's been
taken apart already. So here we have an iPod Mini internals and there we can see where Apple fitted
the Microdrive. And what's interesting about this format is that it is a basically a Compact Flash
card. So Compact Flash originally started as a flash memory format, and then later we moved
into the mechanical spinning format. Which if you had one of these iPod Minis you could simply buy a
Compact Flash card and replace the spinning hard drive with flash memory. As well as being used
inside consumer products, you could actually buy these drives to use maybe fit inside your digital
camera. There's a retail version, there I've got a Hitachi 4 gigabyte. Which this is out of an
iPod as well. So these three little drives are all functional still. So I'm going to put them
aside and I've got this one here and well. This is a faulty Microdrive and it doesn't have the Apple
logo on it. So it means it's not out of an iPod. It does spin but it doesn't work. So this one I
can take apart and have a look at that mechanism. Found a Tri-wing so let's get this open.
Yeah, it looks like we may be on the wrong side. I
have revealed the controller board and OK here we have the mechanism.
I can see a gap into the mechanism now. So it looks like it's now open to the
elements. So this sticker was part of the seal that I'm peeling off now. Four more
screws for this plate on top. OK is this it, yeah that looks pretty good.
That's pretty small. So I I do want to see if I can power this up which means attaching it to
here and putting it into a Compact Flash card reader. Which I just happen to have one handy.
And that was the Microdrive, the second smallest hard drive ever made. And if we compare it to a
full-size SD card, you can see it is really quite a small drive. But it's not the smallest. There
is a smaller one and we can have a look at one of those today. I have here the Nokia N91 mobile
phone. This is from 2004 and this has a hard drive inside of it. Back then flash memory like SD cards
were if you had a 128 Meg that was pretty big. And I think 512 Meg they were available and he
had to pay quite a bit. But Nokia decided to go for, it's gonna power this up and we can ever
listen to it and see how it works. Standard Nokia power up coming in five, four, three, two, one.
OK let's test the music. Make sure it plays OK. OK, so we know the hard disk in this phone does
still work. So let's power off and let's have a look at the disk unit itself. OK,
there's really just those six screws holding this phone together. So this was manufactured
back in the days when things were meant to be taken apart and actually fixed. There
was no need to glue everything together. OK we've got our Nokia open and we're inside.
Look at our main board and here is the hard drive. So let's pop
this out and bracket holding that in. That plate can come out. There
we go and we have a bit of a rubbery surround and there we go. There it is.
So let's get this Microdrive here and this is a point eight five inch platter and,
I have here another one, and this is the this is the same drive. It's out of a different phone and
what I can tell you is that both of these drives work. Because I have pre-tested this drive in
this phone. So both of these drives work which means no taking this mechanism apart. Because we
can see the label to Toshiba, it's a 4 gigabyte and this phone was re-released later in, ok so,
it was released in 2004, and then I think in 2005, they released the 8 gigabyte version. So these
drives were available in up to 8 gigabytes. As were the Microdrives, and so the size of this hard
disk is pretty similar to a full sized SD card. But a lot fatter. Now this interface on here is
actually in theory a usable interface. So let's go and have a look at the predecessor to the SD card,
which is the MMC card. And here's the SD card which replaced it. SD cards are just a little bit
fatter and there's a bit of a ridge on the pins. Whereas MMC is pretty flat, has less pins than
SD. MMC cards split in two different directions. One direction went towards SD and then eventually
micro SD. And the other direction was they developed MMC Plus(+). Which maybe you can see
what's going on here. The interface on these micro hard drives is MMC+. MMC is still in use today,
as EMMC. Which is embedded MMC. So all our phones and gigabytes that we carry around embedded in
our phones, is all based on this original MMC standard. Now, I've tried to read these drives
using SD card readers. But I can't get them to spin up. So that's going to have to be a project
for another time. One thing I am wondering though, is it possible to put one of these MMC cards into
this phone and have it recognize it? OK we've got our half-height MMC Plus card. I think it's lined
up enough to reach those pins. OK let's pair up this phone now and see what happens. I have
found on a Polish forum, a photograph inside one of these drives. So I'm going to show that
to you now and link to the forum below, just in case you read polish and want to be able to
find out more about that particular post where I pilfered this image from. Music library details
tell me that minus 632 gigabytes is used and the available is infinite gigabytes. So I don't think
that card is actually working and you can bet, if I can ever get this interface working, that
I'll be making the world's smallest mechanical spinning hard disk USB memory stick. To finish up,
I'm going to do a comparison of the platter size between the three and a half inch, the 1.8 inch,
the 1 inch and 0.85 inch. If you're using a laptop at the time this video was made,
it's very unlikely you've got a spinning disk inside it. If you've got a desktop,
maybe you've got a spinning disk. But if you've got data in the cloud, even years from after that
when this video is made, it's very very likely all your data is on one of these. Certainly
all these YouTube videos are coming off exactly this sort of platter. OK, that's it, we're done.
Written Addendum: Thanks for watching Janus Cycle. Hopefully
you enjoyed the experience :)