The World's Largest USB Thumb Drive

Admittedly, I know very little about the old "big iron" kind of computer hardware, but that was really cool. Nice work by this guy.
 
Problem decomposition is something that is never really taught..it must be learned, and it is one thee most valuable skills an engineer can have.

Nice work...
 
Tempted to make a bigger one now. I'm sure I can find a room-sized storage server to convert to USB.
 
It's as much of a "USB thumb drive" as a disc burner or an external hard drive installed in an external USB case. IOW, it's not.

Still kind of funny though. It needs more benchmarks.
 
pxc said:
It's as much of a "USB thumb drive" as a disc burner or an external hard drive installed in an external USB case. IOW, it's not.

Still kind of funny though. It needs more benchmarks.
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Thanks for mincing words, we all know what he meant.
 
That was awesome, but this really makes me wonder... when the government is decomming all their stuff, do they wipe the drives? I bought some used servers on my state's surplus auction website, and I remember they fired up with an operating system.... and they had the admin passwords WRITTEN on them. Seems like terrible OPSEC.

We used to take the SIPR drives out and smash them with hammers. Nothing better for getting out computer aggression :D
 
I would totally trust that guy to install the new water chip
 
pxc said:
It's as much of a "USB thumb drive" as a disc burner or an external hard drive installed in an external USB case. IOW, it's not.

Still kind of funny though. It needs more benchmarks.
Click to expand...

i'm glad i don't know you because you may be one of the most boring people i could ever meet.
 
I like how that hard drive has dozens of chips, but from the guy's description has almost no logic. I wonder what they all do.
 
Not a lot of practical use unless you work for the government, but very cool he was able to build his own modern controller for that boat anchor.
 
Somehow I got known as a local go-to guy for legacy (read: insanely obsolete) migrations. Never had to play with PDP mainframes though. Very nice work.
 
Hell yeah, this is awesome!
The guy did a great job with this drive and the controller.
 
flashoverride said:
That was awesome, but this really makes me wonder... when the government is decomming all their stuff, do they wipe the drives? I bought some used servers on my state's surplus auction website, and I remember they fired up with an operating system.... and they had the admin passwords WRITTEN on them. Seems like terrible OPSEC.

We used to take the SIPR drives out and smash them with hammers. Nothing better for getting out computer aggression :D
Click to expand...

Data destruction is a fairly large and lucrative industry, mainly driven by government/military contracts. Crushing them into pieces no larger than 1/250th of an inch used to be standard I think for modern high density drives - though that may be outdated now.
 
hkcavalier said:
Somehow I got known as a local go-to guy for legacy (read: insanely obsolete) migrations. Never had to play with PDP mainframes though. Very nice work.
Click to expand...

Lol welcome to the club of my last job. I would literally have people walk in and drop ancient stuff like this on my bench and tell me to make it work, not ask but demand. I regret the first time I made that happen, I feel I may have set an unreasonable expectation.
 
Building a controller for 40+ year old equipment is impressive.

Being able to actually recover the data is amazing.
 
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