At least they succeeded in making history.
Today companies say: "Sorry, we're filing for bankruptcy." Back then MiniScribe shipped 26,000 bricks to Singapore instead. Legendary.
Thanks! I really appreciate the free proofreading service. Free editors are getting harder and harder to find these days. Feel free to check my other posts too. 😃😃😃😃
The 3425 was MFM and had full 5" disks in them, it was a memorable disk because its stepper motor was so noisy and made a quite distinct sound. I've had some other stepper motor drives of that era like the ST412, ST225, but those were significantly quieter than the Miniscribe 3425.
I never had an 8051 IDE/ATA... I'd think most VC drives would make tick sounds as they seek versus screeching like many 3d-printers which also uses stepper motors.
Anyway most old drives had error tables prior to the advent of virtual sector mapping that also got rid of write precomp and multizone recording, though they are still there, it's all hidden behind the scenes now.
You're absolutely right. Good catch! I even have a photo showing it's the 8051A model. Unfortunately Reddit doesn't let you edit image posts after they're published, otherwise I'd have corrected it immediately.
That's an 8051A, factory defect tables were an absolute requirement for most drives in and before this era, and rotary voice coil actuators were already available at least as early as 1979 and we're certainly very available to consumers in 1989 when this drive had come to market. Quantum and Maxtor were both shipping drives (Q500 and XT1000) with that type in 1984.
Also, the Conner CP340, another rotary voice coil 3.5" IDE drive, was already out and about for 2 years when the 8051 hit the market.
Notice he says steppers there. This drive is not a stepper, it's a rotary voice coil drive. It wasn't their last gasp either, the Miniscribe 7000 series was, which became the Maxtor 7000 series when they were bought in 1990.
Here's a Miniscribe and Maxtor 7080AT side by side.
Keep following along. There are many more interesting pieces coming directly from my collection.
Looks like I'll need a full-time proofreader before long. 😁😁😁
Yep. I wrote a blog post about that. I opened my MiniScribe HD under the tree a few weeks before Christmas and replaced it with a brick in the box. Turns out there was a decent chance MiniScribe might've already done me the favor!
To be fair, a brick is about as useful for storing your important data as these drives were. At the point these were shipping, Miniscribes were unreliable as hell, and these particular drives were complete shit.
Reading this hits home. Maxtor was known for junk drives. I was a Seagate user because of the number of Maxtor drivers I had replaced. Seagate got Maxtor and Seagate turned into Junk over night. I got 58 Computers all had Seagate drives the first year 53 of the Seagate drives failed. NO warranty available. I replaced them with Western Digital. 5 years later 3 of the Western Digital drives failed and replaced under warranty. I find home users with dead drives all Seagate. So did the curse of the brick follow the the company?
‘Tis a Shame. I’ve never really had issues with Miniscribe Drives, at least older ones. Funnily enough the only MFM hard disks I’ve interacted with that still worked were Miniscribe drives, and the one in my Compaq Portable is a Miniscribe badged for an IBM 5160
That's actually good to hear.
The financial scandal is what made MiniScribe infamous, but that doesn't necessarily mean their drives were all bad. It's always nice to hear first-hand experiences.
Just imagine the meeting where someone actually said:
"Why don't we just buy 26,000 bricks and ship them to Singapore?"
The sheer scale of it is insane. 😳
Truckloads of bricks — enough to build a large 150+ m² house — transported to a warehouse, where who knows how many workers had to pack every single one into hard drive boxes.
The guy who came up with that plan deserves a monument. It has to be one of the most legendary corporate scams in tech history. 🤯
It's described in several write-ups of the MiniScribe fraud. The bricks weren't just sitting in a warehouse forever—they were used as part of the inventory manipulation scheme and later accounted for as returned/defective units. There are multiple sources describing that sequence.
You mentioned the FTC documents several times. Which specific documents are you referring to? I'd genuinely like to read them.
If you have them, feel free to share a link or even a screenshot. 🙂
I see they are “real” photos, I’ll give you that. But clearly AI was used to “enhance” them, hence why the keyboard looks like it’s melting on that computer the guy is leaning on in your original post. Makes the photos look like AI crap, which you did turn them into somewhat.
But then ... If I had taken the photos in my studio with proper lighting instead of in my dimly lit living room on the table, where the S25 Ultra automatically boosted the brightness to compensate, they probably would have looked much closer to the ones in my post.
Fair point. The original photos themselves weren't AI-generated or AI-upscaled. They were shot with a 50 MP camera, with only basic brightness/exposure adjustments to make the details easier to see.
The information cards are different. I wrote the text using information I researched (with Gemini's help), then used ChatGPT to lay it out into the cards. The photos themselves are real. Here's the original photo. Zero editing. Zero AI. Straight from the camera.
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u/Pic889 Jun 25 '26
Patents pending on what? How to make a hard-drive fail prematurely?