Here’s another quite interesting drive.
ExcelStor was a company that made hard drives in the early-mid 2000s based on Hitachi’s design and even made drives for Hitachi, recognized by the ES factory code on them. These Hitachi based ExcelStor drives aren’t very rare and are well known.
But, this is NOT one of them. This is ExcelStor's own design! They didn’t only do hitachi based drives, but also their own (they bought Conner Technology and used their design). The Gemini is likely an evolution of that design, and existed with two capacities, 40 and 80GB using a single platter and 2 heads. These drives might very well be the highest capacity and last hard drives to be designed by a "small" manufacturer! These were lower cost offerings, and appear to be quite uncommon compared to the hitachi based ones.
Even if it’s larger capacity than what I’m usually interested in, I’m glad to have a drive that’s unusual and part of hard drive history marking the end of small manufacturers designs, leading to where we are now with very few manufacturers left and no chance that a small manufacturer will ever try again (density is too advanced, and it is way easier for a small manufacturer to make low end SSDs that does not require any precise mechanical parts)
This drive is a contact start-stop design compared to the ramp based one that the Hitachi based ones use. The loud sound it makes when unparking the heads is strange but I believe it to be normal. The seeking sounds is pretty nice and loud, I like that. The seek times appear to not be the best but it was a low end offering so we can’t really blame it.
My exemple here has 1 reallocated sector but otherwise works properly.
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