I’ve been quite busy over the holiday break, but whilst visiting my parents I found what I thought was a mystery hard disk. Here’s a photo.
It has Trigem on the label, something I’ve not seen before. I didn’t know until looking closer at the drive much later that it’s actually a Samsung drive manufactured for Trigem, who was the company behind e-machines. So it’s no surprise that it was in an e-machine that Dad found it.
If you look on the underside of this drive you can see that the board is even labeled as being a Samsung Voyager 3A, 4A or 5A.
Having discovered it’s not exactly as mysterious as I thought I decided to power it on and give it a quick test to see if it works. Given that it had been floating around Dad’s shed for quite some time I was quite surprised that it spun up and had no bad sectors. It achieved about 9MB/s using a USB2IDE adapter when reading the entire surface. I loaded up some disk diagnostic software to check out what kind of condition the drive is in.
It identifies itself as a Samsung SV0322A spinpoint drive and despite its age it seems in relatively good condition. It’s quite small at only 3.2Gb, but it will probably be useful for a retro machine running either DOS or Win9x, so I’ll be adding this drive to my collection of other retired hard disks.
sparcie 
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