For some unknown reason I should not ask people about components. It always ends a few months or years later with enormous amounts of them.
A few months ago I decided to gather parts for a few hardware projects, including CT1024 terminal. I needed 6 chips of 2102 memory for it. I quickly found 3 of them in my stuff, and after asking some people I found 3 more. Recently someone sold me a large box of TTL chips, in which there were >25 of 2102s by some accident. These were the only non-74 chips there.
Similar thing with MFM hard drives and these full-height 3.5" ATAs (40-80MB). Last Friday a friend just dropped me a bag of them. "Hello, 5 years ago you asked about drives, here, I don't need these".
In these drives, I found a Nec D5146, one of the early units. Hand-written 4-digit serial number and date (1985). Generally it works. No bad sectors, no surface defects, survived NDD and will probably survive SpinRite tests. It's not a total "tank" like ST225, which just runs for 30 years the same way, but it is also quite durable. But the sound it makes is just awful. It's not the motor or bearings, but grounding contact to the hub, the metallic screeching causes pain in the teeth.
Temporary solution: Replace existing ?iron? metal grounding clamp with copper one. Good thing that it's fastened, not soldered.
