Sounds of the Areal Technology A260- My favorite drive! Benchmarks & booting Win95

Описание к видео Sounds of the Areal Technology A260- My favorite drive! Benchmarks & booting Win95

The moment I saw the A260, I knew I had to have it- or at least something similar. It looked awesome and sounded amazing. The spindle has this lovely smooth sound. It's much more pleasant than the loud whine most other drives of the time made. Unfortunately for me, this drive is extremely rare. On eBay there were none, there's barely any information about it online as well. There was one lovely video about this drive on YouTube however. So I figured it was a hopeless case and I could just keep hoping. I ended up finding an untested A180 on eBay and I convinced the seller to give it to me for $50. It ended up working! It was actually pretty different from the A260. I made a video about it,    • Sounds of the Areal Technology A180- ...  . Eventually I heard about importing stuff from Japan using Sendico, and there was an A260 verified working. I was in disbelief. And it was just over $20. I ended up getting some other stuff as well(maybe a little too much). Anyways, now I have my favorite drive! So in this video we watch it boot Windows 95 and do some benchmarks. Timestamps are below. This drive has a few sister models I know of that are very similar(and I want desperately), the A130, A340 and A520. All seem to be even rarer than this drive.

Chapters:
Spin-up & down: 0:00
Booting Windows 95 RTM: 0:10
hdmotion.exe: 1:11
SpeedSys: 3:22
chkdsk: 6:10
ScanDisk: 6:18

Drive specs:
Form factor: 2.5"
Interface: IDE(2.5)
Capacity: 260MB
RPM: Around 3000
DOM: 1994, Week 27
Actuator: Rotary voice coil
Made in: Japan
Health: Good

About Areal:
You likely haven't heard of Areal before. They were a relatively small hard drive manufacturer most prominent in the early 90's before being acquired and fading away. They produced the first drives with glass platters, as they were found to have higher areal data density and shock resistance. Other companies quickly followed. Their name actually appears to come from the word "areal", as in areal density. Indeed, their drives had exceptional areal density for the time. They were mainly a manufacturer of 2.5" drives, completely so by the 90's. Doesn't seem like they were competitive enough though, as no major OEMs used their products, except Sharp at one point.

Equipment used:
IBM Aptiva Type 2137-E26
-used for all benchmarks and booting Windows
-the power supply in the unit is very loud, my apologies if it's audible in the recording
2021 MacBook Pro 14"
-used for recording the audio, drive is placed on left palmrest

If you have a suggestion, or notice an error, please comment down below!
Follow me on Instagram: @antequated.archive

Thanks for watching!

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