Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives

As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I thought it would be fun to share my take on it anyway. What I’m talking about is how a lot of these hard drives just refuse to work anymore. This is very common with old Quantum ProDrive models, like the LPS or the ELS. The drive spins up, you don’t hear the expected pattern of click sounds at startup, and then after a few seconds, it spins back down. This Conner CP30175E drive has a similar problem, but it tries over and over again, playing a tone through the voice coil (I think) in between attempts. These particular hard drives shown in the videos are both about 160 MB in capacity and were commonly used in computers during the early-to-mid 1990s. You can see they have ... Read full article.