HARD DISK DRIVES LIST

This list features about 3800 entries, gathering information on more than 2000 different hard disk drives.

There’s no new material, rather, I gathered the information from some sources I had at my disposal (see below).

The list is available in CSV, a format which allows to import it easily in most spreadsheets or databases.
Click here to open it (or better, right click on the link to save the list locally).

SOURCES AND CREDITS

Main sources for my list were "Wanted HD", a public domain software written by Massimiliano Graziani in 1994, listing more than 1800 Hard Drives, and "The Reference" (or simply "TheRef", Version 4.3 - 1993), listing about 1900 Drives. I made use of these two lists for some years, but I had soon to realize that they didn't agree in every case. I decided, thus, to join them, including all entries from both lists in a single file.
The two main sources are indicated as:
(W) "Wanted HD" by Massimiliano Graziani
(R) "The Reference" version 4.3
The two sources in some cases even disagree on such things as capacity, number of heads, encoding method, or even phisical size (3,5” vs. 5,25”) of the drives. I thus decided not to try to join the sources, but rather to keep both entries (“W” and “R”) for each drive. In most cases, source "R" should be preferred, as it is, generally speaking, far more reliable than "W", which is often in error.

Other sources are indicated as:
(M) Manufacturer's specifications, data-sheets, and assorted documentation (e.g., Quantum).
(O) Other sources (including Campbell Technical website, with lists of disks by Conner, etc.)

Some editing has been done, mostly aimed at making sources a little more consistent (for instance, one source has IBM’s disks as WDA-380, WDA-3160, etc., while the other has WDA 380 and WDA 3160, thus I removed the “-“). In this manner it will be easy to sort records by drive model.Please note that, depending on the source, drive size is indicated either as “HH” or “Half”, or as “FH” or “Full”, that IDE interface is indicated AT-BUS or IDE(AT) / IDE(XT), etc. I didn’t try to harmonize these issues.

I added a field called “Actual” in which I calculated the disk capacity by multiplying Heads, Cyls and Sectors, as ofter what is reported under “Format” is wrong or grossly approximated in one or both sources.

I hope this list will be of some help to somebody. Of course, I absolutely do not warrant that the information is correct.

This page was first published on the web on Jan. 16, 2005