Anyone here old enough to have worked with this hard drive??

haybaker said:

Flashback, seeing one of these. Wow. Yes, I used to service these, filters, heads, alignment, electronics, and this fascinating bit of technology where you had to perfectly align 2 PC boards about .005 in apart, that had interlaced traces on them used for track spacing on the linear motor. I used to have a couple of them. They were massive. Weighed about 175 pounds, and had this 1 inch thick aluminum slab plate that I used to strip everything off of, to sell for aluminum scrap. Wow, what people would pay for those. State of the art in 1980s. I also had one of its 90 MB big brothers - the CDC Phoenix.

I don't know about the weight of that SA 1000 drive. I remember that a salesman gave me a demo unit, in box, since I had done him a few favors. I don't remember that much, but the box wasn't that heavy.

Are you mixing this drive up with the CDC Phoenix, which might have weighed 175 pounds. Back in the early 1980s, CDC was the OEM hard drive manufacturing powerhouse, with 14" platter drives. Some were a mixture of fixed and removable cartridge drives.
When CDC came out with the 8" platter Lark drive, that was a big deal, except I don't think it really caught on.

By the mid to late 80s, I if I remember correctly, CDC was forced out of the lower end of the OEM drive market.