I Repaired This 1970’s Hard Drive, but I Still Can’t Use It

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of spinning rust, and so I’m always going to jump on an opportunity to work on my all time favorite hard drive, the CDC Hawk. This particular drive came from the amazing Dave McGuire over at the Large Scale Systems Museum (https://www.mact.io/) up in Pittsburgh. But, this Hawk Drive is a Straddle-Erase instead of the Pre-Erase I need. What does that mean? Well, that’s what the video is for! If you want to know more about the Centurion, the wiki is full of just about everything we know: https://github.com/Nakazoto/CenturionComputer/wiki If you want to support the channel please hop over to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/usagielectric Also, we now have some epic shirts for sale! https://my-store-11554688.creator-spring.com Come join us on Discord! Discord: https://discord.gg/p7UsfHD Intro Music adapted from: Artist: The Runaway Five Title: The Shinra Shuffle https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847 Thanks for watching! Chapters 0:00 This is my forever computer 3:40 Welcome to the CDC Hawk Drive 8:09 Let’s take this thing apart 9:30 Head crashes! 12:34 Head coils 14:09 Straddle erase and pre-erase, an introduction 16:29 Cleaning and rebuilding 19:51 Loading the heads and test drive 23:25 So, why can’t I use straddle erase heads? 28:55 Slow motion noms!