On Oct 10, 8:33 am, "Joe AutoDrill" wrote:
I wish I still had the two gigantic 12 meg hard drives I picked up in the
80's... 36" long by about 24" wide and about 10-12" thick... I'm sure
there were possibly some huge magnets in there...

--

Regards,
Joe Agro, Jr.
(800) 871-5022
01.908.542.0244
Automatic / Pneumatic Drills:http://www.AutoDrill.com
Multiple Spindle Drills:http://www.Multi-Drill.com

V8013-R

"Ernie Sty" wrote in message

...



A guy I know bid on an old non-working hard drive. It was big, something
like ten inches by maybe 18 inches by three inches. I asked him why he
wanted it, and he said he'd show me.

A few days later, the display on my CRT started wobbling. The guy was
holding a magnet a good six feet away from my monitor and rotating it
slightly. Needless to say, he got it out of the hard drive. He had to
use a ball joint separator to get the two magnets apart. Each one was
about the size of two decks of cards, if I recall correctly.

I never found out what the strength of those magnets was. He soon made
the mistake of holding one in each hand. They got too close together and
in a split second they had collided, nipping off a little of the skin from
his fingers in the process. I figure he's really lucky that's all that
happened. I can think of a number of ways it could have been worse.

He brought in the now-stuck-together magnets and surprisingly (to me,
anyway) their magnetic pull for other objects was very weak, like they
were each absorbing the magnetism of the other. I asked if he was going
to try to separate them, and he said no, and showed me that they were both
cracked.

I think he was, too, a little.

Anyway, that's all the experience I've had with what were to me
monstrously powerful magnets.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I still have a head positioning magnet from a disk drive from the
original Cray1.
The drive was as big as a couple washing machines, and ran on 208V
three phase.
The drive magnets were about 12" X 10" X 10" in a cube.
That beast could heat a house, and had a whopping 300 MegByte. NOT
GigaByte... MegaByte.
When they did seeks, whole buildings could shake. Litterally.
I almost saw a huge old IBM 360 system tip over in the same room when
these drives were installed, from the floor shaking.