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(Nearly) Complete Kalok Octagon Lineup

Hi, colleagues. Excellent HDD Octagon collection. It is missing one more model. This is an attempt at a joint venture in the USSR. To begin with, we simply glued stickers. There was no continuation :(.
 

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Oh, wow! Where did you get those? I'd love to have some someday. There's a lot of drives I want to import from former Soviet states, but getting anyone willing to help out has proved impossible so far. If you know the whereabouts of some of them and would be willing to help get them to the states (of course, I am willing to pay) please send me a message.
 
I’ll bet those didn’t give off the best impression of “American” products to Russian customers.
(Of course, they’re actually not made in the US at all…)
 
Wow, those still work? Kalok/Octagon drives were terrible, even when they were new. Made in India, I think. Rolled into JTS (another terrible Jugi Tandon enterprise) after bankruptcy, I believe.
 
famicomaster2 said:
Oh, wow! Where did you get those? I'd love to have some someday. There's a lot of drives I want to import from former Soviet states, but getting anyone willing to help out has proved impossible so far. If you know the whereabouts of some of them and would be willing to help get them to the states (of course, I am willing to pay) please send me a message.
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HDDs made in the USSR and socialist countries (also made by Izot Bulgaria and Robotron GDR) deserve a separate topic :). Mostly there were relabeled Kalok, Miniscribe, Microscience, NEC, Seagate and even Prairietek. Several Seagate clones were also made and several of our own developments. By 1995, all production facilities were closed.

3lectr1c said:
I’ll bet those didn’t give off the best impression of “American” products to Russian customers.
(Of course, they’re actually not made in the US at all…)
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At that time there was no choice. And it’s difficult for me to judge their reliability. Then I used Seagate ST351A/X. It's still working fine.
Chuck(G) said:
Wow, those still work? Kalok/Octagon drives were terrible, even when they were new.
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Yes, some workers.
 
JTS purchased them when they filed for bankruptcy in the end of 1994, I believe. The only product they kept producing was the P3 cartridge system, which I also have a complete collection of. That became the JTS CHAMP, Palladium, and Champion. TEAC also had a licensed copy for a while under the name TEAC-STOR.
 
Alright, I sent him a message.

Additionally, yes all of my drives pictured here work. There are very few stepper drives I have been unable to resuscitate.
 
By "work" do you mean read/write with fewer than 10 media defects? Or do you mean that they spin up? My recollection of my encounters with Kalok and JTS drives are not pleasant.
 
Just an arbitrary number, like bruises on fruit. You don't mind a few, but when they propagate, that's a bad sign. Everybody's got their limit. 5MB of bad sectors on a 100MB drive, for example, is too much for my tastes.
 
I see. Personally, I'm just in it for the mechanical aspect. Almost all of my drives spin and seek and most of them will read and write. I have an IMI 5018H with one full surface of bad sectors. It doesn't matter to me.

I actually know a guy with a Maxtor XT-2190 that only has 5MB of usable space. It's just part of the collection.
 
famicomaster2 said:
I actually know a guy with a Maxtor XT-2190 that only has 5MB of usable space. It's just part of the collection.
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Maxtor XT-2190 5MB Excellent sample! In my collection there is only Izot 5300 = 5MB. The rest are all from 20MB and more.
 
Haha, thats actually really bad. The XT-2190 is actually one of the largest MFM drives ever sold, at 155MB nominal. 233MB if you format them as RLL. That specific drive has some fairly severe internal damage, though, I think only 3 or 4 of the heads are working and there's some surface damage on the disks. I have a lot of drives in my collection at the 5MB mark. To quickly name a few: Seagate ST-506, IZOT EC-5300, Texas Instruments TI-5, JCT 100, SyQuest SQ-306RD. Most of my drives are 45MB or less.

I've got an IZOT EC-5300 as well myself! Interesting drive, a clone of the Seagate ST-506. Here's some pictures of my example:
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Interesting! That drives does spin but I have not verified it's seek capability. Finding a 16-bit controller which can do 3ms unbuffered seek is extremely difficult.
 
Found a KALOK 320 laying loose in an engine analyzer I bought. It was hooked to a WDXT-GEN card via two flat ribbon cables. My suspicion is that the drive contains the operating system for the engine analyzer and has either gone bad, never was used, or previous owner of the analyzer wasn't knowledgeable about such things. I am certainly not knowledgeable myself but want to hook it into the system and see what happens. From what you know, is the driver card the proper one? Thanks
 
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