from the weve-heard-of-bricking-a-hard-drive-but dept.
We've Heard Of Bricking A Hard Drive, But...:
Mass storage has come a long way since the introduction of the personal computer. [Tech Time Traveller] has an interesting video about the dawn of PC hard drives focusing on a company called MiniScribe. After a promising start, they lost an IBM contract and fell on hard times.
We'd heard of MiniScribe, but a lot of companies from those days came and went. What we didn't remember is that once it was taken over by a turnaround firm, pressure to perform caused the company's executives to do some creative bookkeeping which finally came back to haunt them.
Apparently, the company was faking inventory to the tune of $15 million because executives feared for their jobs if profits weren't forthcoming. Once they discovered the incorrect inventory, they not only set out to alter the company's records to match it, but they also broke into an outside auditing firm's records to change things there, too.
Senior management hatched a plan to charge off the fake inventory in small amounts to escape the notice of investors and government regulators. But to do that, they need to be able to explain where the balance of the nonexistent inventory was. So they leased a warehouse to hold the fraud inventory and filled it with bricks. Real bricks like you use to build a house. Around 26,000 bricks were packaged in boxes, assigned serial numbers, and placed on pallets. Auditors would see the product ready to ship and there were even plans to pretend to ship them to CompuAdd and CalAbco, two customers, who had agreed to accept and return the bricks on paper allowing them to absorb the $15 million write off a little at a time.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by drussell on Saturday April 16 2022, @12:22PM (6 children)
I'm not sure who started this recent resurgence of retelling the Miniscribe downfall story... It's been popping up all over everywhere lately.
It's a well known story, I'm not sure why it's getting so much attention now. It's hardly the worst case of corporate deceit in the business world, so I find it kind of baffling.
It kinda sucked since at the time I used a lot of Miniscribe hard disks. Most models were generally pretty reliable and they were very cost effective, even inexpensive to repair and get back in service.
I ran two 3560s in my BBS machine running on a Perstor disk controller (which pushed the drives to 31 sectors per track instead of the stock 17, turning them into 77 megabyte drives instead of 42) for many years in the mid 1980s until the media finally wore out. If they'd had the better media like they used in some of the 3675s (same drive, factory rated to handle RLL at 26 sectors per track,) they probably would have run fine, even on the Perstor, until the physical mechanisms finally wore out.
They were slow and noisy but BBS use was incredibly hard on hard disk drives, and those ol' 3650s ran for years under this extreme torture. They were only rated for something like 810 "data" cylinders, with the outermost cylinders reserved for a "parking" zone for shipping, but I always ran mine formatted all the way out to the last addressable cylinder at 850 or 855 or something to get that extra few megabytes. Maximum storage space was the key back then, not reliability and longevity. I beat the crap out of those drives and they just took it with a happy bleepity-bleep-boop-boop of their stepper motors.
The stepper-motor driven drives seemed to have had a bad reputation for reliability but I found them no worse than, say a Seagate. My 3650s outran many other Sysops who had ST-251s, and none of them could even think about running their drives on a Perstor. It simply wouldn't work. You HAD to use ST-277s for any hope of running at 31 sectors per track. We used lots of the 3.5" stepper drives and the mechanisms were actually pretty reliable, did have to get a few boards worked on but it was only something like $40 each to have them repaired down at TLSI in Texas. 8450? Maybe? I think it was the 8450s that we had board problems with? It was just an RLL-certified version of the 8438. We used a fair number of those 8450s. I might even still have one around here somewhere.
The voice-coil actuator drives were better quality all over, and much higher performance seek-time-wise than the steppers, but were more expensive, so you often generally might as well just buy a Micropolis or a CDC or something when you got to that price range. The Microscience HH-1050s were a pretty common choice for Sysops, although I know a couple guys were running Miniscribe 3053s (voice coil 25ms, 44 meg) with good, reliable success. Once things passed the about-40-meg-per-drive days, most guys went to large, expensive ESDI or went to SCSI setups. I went to a Fujitsu 180 meg when the original Miniscribes started to die, then added SCSI and then various IDE.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2022, @12:48PM (1 child)
You reminded me my story with these drives.
With all of these Kalok/CMI/CMS thing. The most funny thing was with the Octagon.
This was THE Octagon, the very first 20MB model, It was from times when KL-320 were known as later and faulty. Many people argued that it was outsourced and not made by Kalok, but mine had Kalok sticker. And it was historically assumed that Kalok indeed made these.
On top, there was CMS sticker, because the company was purchased.
On top there was the CMI certification sticker, because they adapted this to 30MB (RLL). For some reason they changed electronics, to the one with BASIC stamp on it, and it was magically RLL certified.
And it was working since '85 to mid-90s. A few years ago I turned the old computer on - the disk died, instead of moving head it just barked from its motor. Quite frequent for steppers not moved for a few years. They are stepper drives with the spike-ended screw pointing into the shaft to stabilize it. You remove the sticker, remove the screw, apply lubrication to the tip and restore it back. I did this with Rodime and Kyocera drives without problems.
So then I removed all stickers I found that there is another one below Kalok: INTEGRAL.
Who the hell was Integral? I don't know. But the sandwich of 4 stickers tells a bit about these drives history. The stepper technology was pushed by Kalok to the limits, there were even 150MB drives with steppers inside.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2022, @01:58PM
You removed the stickers! But the warranty! Think of the warranty!
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday April 16 2022, @02:33PM (2 children)
Looks like it was the YouTube video mentioned in the article. Googling, I see a couple other webpages mention that video.
(Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Saturday April 16 2022, @07:20PM (1 child)
(Score: 4, Funny) by sgleysti on Saturday April 16 2022, @10:06PM
A youtuber should make a video about this process...
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 19 2022, @12:49AM
They do just to get some good stories from an old timer.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Nobuddy on Sunday April 17 2022, @07:42PM
I worked for Maxtor right after they absorbed miniscribe, and I worked at a former miniscribe facility. WHen I started, the guy I shared a cube with went to storage and got me one of the unshipped brick filled sealed boxes as a welcome gift.
I think I still have it somewhere. I know I never intentionally threw it out.