in the mid-1980s the IBM PC and many clones had two drive bays and two floppy drives so
if you wanted to add a hard drive that meant sacrificing one of your floppy drives and if
you did have the original IBM PC you would also need to upgrade the power
supply because the stock IBM unit didn't have enough current to handle most hard
drives and then of course you needed to add the drive controller card some cables
instead of all this mess wouldn't it be so much easier if installing a hard drive was as simple
as installing an expansion card well that's exactly what the Plus Development Corporation a
subsidiary of the hard drive manufacturer Quantum thought in 1985 when they invented the Hardcard
"we'll begin by looking at an incredible new device that's a hard disk on a card
and it's called the Hardcard" "with Hardcard anyone who uses the PC can
install it in about 10 minutes so it's very easy to install we've
been able to reduce the size of hard card to a single IBM expansion slot"
to install it all you need to do is remove your PC's cover
remove one of the expansion slot brackets
and pop in the Hardcard
then just tighten down the retaining screw and you're ready to go
the first Hardcard which was introduced in 1985 had a capacity of 10 megabytes and a
list price of $1095 and I've never seen one of those so I don't think they sold very many
but the next model introduced in 1986 was a runaway success the Hardcard 20. it not only
had double the capacity of the original Hardcard it also had a lower price $895
and also had about half the power consumption drawing only 8 watts of power instead of 14.
of course like any good idea other companies started making knockoffs of it almost immediately
those included the Mountain Computer Drivecard the Western Digital Filecard the Tandon Diskard
and the Sysdyne PHD by 1986 there were over 30 companies making hard
drives on a card you could even buy a kit to make your own hardcard out
of any 3½" hard drive and short length ISA controller card and hardcards were
not just in PCs Commodore introduced the A2091 hardcard for desktop Amiga computers
the Plus Development Corporation was granted a patent for the Hardcard in 1987 but the only
part of that patent they were able to enforce was the innovation of truly integrating the
hard drive into the card and making it thin enough to fit into a single expansion slot so
if you compare the Hardcard with the hard disk card that Tandy sold maybe you can tell by the
size of the box that it's a lot thicker so they couldn't stop other companies from making hard
drive cards but none of them could be as thin as the original Hardcard so unlike its chunky
competitors the Hardcard will fit neatly between two full-length expansion cards with room to spare
even in an XT where the slots are closer together than in this PC
just one thing you need to be careful of when installing a Hardcard is this metal
tab here that's designed to fit into one of the plastic guides in
the front of the case so you really have to make sure that these things
are installed in your case to properly support the Hardcard as you install it
unlike other hard drive controllers which often had a multitude of jumpers
to configure there's only one jumper on the Hardcard it's labeled PC and
XT and the PC position the Hardcard is the primary hard drive because the original IBM
PC did not come with a hard drive so installing this would be your primary hard drive and an
XT position this would be the secondary hard drive because the XT did come with a hard drive
but you could keep in place when you added this which would then become your secondary hard drive
I also have the original manual that came with the Hardcard and while I was able to find an
archive of the software that came with it I was not able to find a copy of the manual so
I'll scan this one in and I'll include a link in the description if you want to download it
the drive and the Hardcard was made by Matsushita and I believe it was the first 1" high 3½" hard
drive which is the same form factor used by modern hard drives and just like modern hard
drives it is a voice coil design instead of using a stepper motor and has automatic
drive head parking which makes it immune to temperature variations and damage during transport
Unfortunately they are not immune to age-related failure and it seems like
most Hardcards are no longer functional but luckily this
one is still working so I'll give you a sample of what it sounds like starting up
when I first boot up the PC with the hard card installed it says "bad or
missing command interpreter" but that's not unexpected because when I first got
the Hardcard the jumper was in the XT position indicating it was installed
as a secondary hard drive and thus the partition on it is not bootable
but if I boot up using a floppy disk I can access the C drive which is the
Hardcard and there you can see some of the files and directories that were on it from
its previous owner including copies of Lotus 1-2-3, MultiMate and Windows 3.0
for example here's starting up MultiMate which was a word processor
and you can see it was licensed to Michael Bulkley at Westinghouse Electric but I have no interest
in going through 30-year-old personal files so I'm just going to delete the partition on the Hardcard
create a new DOS partition and now I'm going to format it
and one thing you may have noticed is the flashing plus symbol in the upper right corner of the
screen which indicates the drive activity because there is no visible drive access indicator LED
through the front panel of the computer this was an optional feature that the
hard drive on a card came with to indicate when it's being accessed and looks like we
have some bad sectors so we'll see how good this drive still is after 35 years
there it finished formatting it's only about 51K in bad sectors which I don't
think is too bad and I'm not worried about that because I don't trust any
computer equipment this old to store any Irreplaceable files
and there is the hard card booting up
and it has almost 21 megabytes free
it's
quite a bit faster than the original hard drive that the IBM
XT came with about one and a half times faster
and here's something unusual maybe you can see that I just tried to use that diagnostic
program to check the interleave of the Hardcard and it popped up this
message saying that a low level format operation has been attempted and this
operation has been interrupted so no data or media defect information would be lost
so this is the Hardcard intervening to make sure I don't screw things up
I'm doing a ScanDisk surface scan on it and it did not find any more bad sectors
on it than the original format did so at least for now this drive should be reliable
in case you're curious like I was the Hardcard 20 uses an interleave of 3:1
which is really the best you can do on a PC or XT running at 4.77 MHz and as for using
the Hardcard 20 in a 286 or higher machine it is possible if you have the BIOS upgrade
that they made available in December 1986 but in addition to that BIOS upgrade you
would also need a motherboard with an 8-bit ISA slot because you may have noticed that
this metal frame physically blocks it from being installed into a 16-bit slot
in 1987 Plus Development Corporation introduced a 40 megabyte Hardcard then in late 1989 they
introduced the Hardcard II which has a 16-bit at bus interface it was available in capacities of
40 and 80 megabytes and has a 1:1 interleave and a 64K cache to improve disk access speed
then in 1990 they followed that with the Hardcard II XL with capacities of
50 and 105 megabytes and finally in 1992 they introduced the Hardcard EZ
and it was available in capacities of 42, 85, 127, or 240 megabytes
I think it was the release of MS-DOS 6 in 1993 which turned out to be the death knell
of the Hardcard because consumers who were running low on disk space were more likely
to be enticed by its promise of doubling their hard drive capacity using its included
DoubleSpace disk compression software even if it turned out to be notoriously unreliable
unfortunately these days Hardcards are also notoriously unreliable especially these older
8-bit models that's because there's a rubber component inside the drive which becomes sticky
with age and eventually the drive heads get stuck to it then the drive no longer works
it is actually possible to repair these hard cards and there are several tutorial
videos on how to do that but it's a delicate process which involves opening up the drive
removing the perished rubber component and replacing it and unless you have a
clean room which most people don't once you open up a hard drive you make it prone to
dust contamination which can cause a head crash so even if you're able to fix that
problem and get the drive working again it still may not be reliable in the long term
so for now I'm just going to keep using this Hardcard as is because luckily this
one still is working and hopefully it's going to stay that way for a while longer