Recently, we came across an old advertisement for a 10-megabyte hard disk manufactured in 1983 by XCOMP, Inc. While the capacity hardly seems surprising for the time, the price tag was unexpected—just $3398!
Designed for use with computers that ran under DOS or CP/M operating systems, the drive used the same kind of technology that many modern drives use, where sets of read/write heads float on a cushion of air over the platter surface.
Every month or so, DriveSavers receives a handful of low capacity drives like these and others made by Miniscribe, Microscience and Rodime for data recovery. Although it’s been more than twenty years since these devices were manufactured, DriveSavers maintains an inventory of over 20,000 parts that includes drives that are unlikely to be found anywhere else which allows us to recover data typically thought to be lost forever.
