Fujitsu G1 AV MEA3320BT 320GB (2008) - Hard Drive Sounds

The Fujitsu G1 AV is Fujitsu's very last (known) consumer-grade hard drive model, being available for OEM's in 2008. They found a particular presence in AV equipment within Japan. It's currently unknown whether or not they found implementation outside of the country.

The MEA3320BT is the only known model in the series, at least from current information available. They may perhaps be the only 3,600 RPM fluid-bearing or SATA drive in existence, reading solid 60Hz (I verified this twice, with suitable equipment outside of this audio recording). Many thanks to the several commentors on the previous upload, who discussed the discrepancy in my old video where I blindly stated that they were 5,400 RPM. It's still quite strange in retrospect that these are such slow spinners, I simply thought "oh, it must be 5,400 RPM!". How wrong I was...

These drives feature two different initialisation modes, depending on whether or not a controller is hooked up. Please note that the listed specifications in the table below are possibly quite inaccurate, given there's no internal images of these drives. One day, when one dies, I'll pop it open and film it. Given all the listings I've seen of these have been in good shape, that may be quite a while away (unless someone else gives it a go first!). I've considered picking one up to sacrifice for a while for this very reason, but it feels wrong to do that to a perfectly working & fairly unusual/rare drive.

This is a re-upload & special extra video for the week. I've recently switched to using a different microphone preamp, which handles quiet (well, these are nigh impossible to hear) drives like this a little better. I've added some extra footage and information this time around too.
Hopefully this video does these interesting modern drives some more justice. The audio on this video is far more representative of how they actually sound, when purely amplified (I'll put it bluntly: these are not easy to record). They're really super quiet. I'd argue probably as, if not more, difficult than recording a demo of something like the DiamondMax Plus 8's.
Thanks for watching again, if you've seen this before!

As usual, I went into more detail about this drive on my site post, which you can find here (with pictures): https://bananahdd.nl/index.php/2022/1...

Drive Attributes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fujitsu G1 AV MEA3320BT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Capacity 320GB
Mfc Date 2008-09-25
Format 3.5"
Interface SATA
Platters 1*
Heads 2*
Cache 8MB
RPM 3600
Protocol Serial-ATA/300 (lm./150)
*unverified, per no data available
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for checking out the video.

Chapters:
0:00 Startup & Spin-down (with controller)
0:21 Xubuntu 22.04 LTS Demonstration
2:24 Idle
3:01 Read/Write Benchmark
4:50 File Access/Transfer
5:55 Spin-down
6:05 Startup & Spin-down (without controller)

Recorded with a Shure SM58. Gain is +20dB, 5cm recording distance.
Recording procedure: https://bananahdd.nl/index.php/about/
All content on this channel falls under Creative Commons CC0 licensing. Accreditation is preferred, but not necessary.
Date of recording: 2023-08-14