Although hard disks weren’t a common feature yet in many home computers in the 1980s, they were becoming increasingly more affordable. For relative meanings of the word ‘affordable’, naturally. This is illustrated by the 12 MB HDD for the Radio Shack TRS-80 that [Clint] over at LGR recently took a peek at.
Costing a cool $3,495 in 1983 – or $11,932 in 2026 USD – this 12 MB storage wonder used a Tandon TM-603 full-height 5.25″ HDD inside. Lacking a working TRS-80 to try it out with, the video is limited to just a basic powering up and opening up of the unit, but [Clint] will be donating it to a computer museum who can hopefully put it to use again.
The connection to the TRS-80 computer is handled by a ribbon cable, while the HDD has its own built-in power supply, rated at 60 Watt.
On the main board for the external HDD controller there is a Signetics 8X300 microprocessor that forms the brains of what makes it into an external drive for the TRS-80. Despite its age, it still looks brand new inside, so despite the Rifa capacitors in the PSU, [Clint] decided to power it on. This resulted in an auditory experience that’s probably best compared to a very rusty jet engine spinning up after languishing for a decade prior to spooling up for take-off.
Hopefully we’ll find out whether this particular unit and its HDD are still working in 2026.
That brings back memories.
That both true and bad humour
I remember that, but I could not afford that as a college student. Awesome memories. Instill have my TRS 80 Model 1, a dot matrix printer, hard drive, expansion interface, and more.
all that fuss and bother to store two or three MP3s!
Not MP3s, MOD files! This thing would have had held a dozen if not a hundred of 4-channel ProTracker/NoiseTracker songs! ^^
I think it’s a beauty and 10 MB of storage was a lot for ASCII data, DWG/DXF or dBase files.
It’s also fine for an CP/M or MP/M system, I think.
The IBM PC/XT started out with a 5 MB Fixed-Disk drive, I think.
Some TRS-80 system had an Unix type OS that could use the Fixed-Disk.
It think that was the TRS-80 Model 16 running MS Xenix.
Many Amiga users in 1990 could only dream about a HDD and still used 4x floppy disk stations with 880 KB each.
That antique 1983 Fixed-Disk drive still ran circles around that setup.
Some goes for C64 users, I think.
A converted TRS-80 drive from 1983 would still been a C64 owner’s wet dream in 1993..
the closest thing these days to working within this order of magnitude of storage is the 4 megabyte “volume” on an ESP8266-based NodeMCU, something you can buy for about $3. that can be a surprisingly big space for needs like persistent configuration, OTA firmware updates, and even logging. i’ve been gradually building a network-based OS for connected remote control and sensing ESP8266s here: https://github.com/judasgutenberg/Esp8266_RemoteControl
I have a working TRS-80 Model 4P, and I would gladly give up a body part to get one of these drives. They are as rare as hen’s teeth, and in working condition…
(Note: my TRS-80 can read SD cards, so I’m not hurting for media or storage… It’s like old car guys who are looking for a particular hubcap or something…)
Even non- working ones are nice to house a FreHD.
Not sure anyone from the early 1980s referred to hard disks as affordable LOL. Given floppies were like $1 apiece, and this held about 75 disks (single density 5.25” that did 80KB apiece per side, floppy drives then used one side and you flipped the disk to use the other side), half that for double density, and the models witrh 8″ did 250 or 500KB a side so that was only like 24 or 12 disks for them.
Keeping in mind a typical amount of RAM was 48KB so even an 80KB disk, this wasn’t some uselessly small amount like it sounds like today.
(I’ll note the TRS-80 was actually a series of barely related systems between model 1 through 4 and others ranging from a typical 1980s PC to CPM system to one that ran some type of UNIX, it’s possible they had adapters to hook this drive up to any of them or it may have just been for a few models. I had an Atari 800 when I was young so I’m not a TRS-80 afficionado and couldn’t provide more detail here.)
Early TRS-80s had 4k of dram and no storage. None. And a floppy drive was extra. Most folks used cassettes!
I had that drive for business back in the 80s. It had Fortran with the system to analyze data. Big step up from flippies.
I worked at RS for a while selling Tandy 1000’s to Tandy 4000’s, but we would often get the old TRS-80 stuff coming in for upgrades and repairs. It was difficult even then to find things like hard disks that would fit the TRS-80, not to mention prohibitively expensive and the prices just went up as supply went down.
I recall my first hard disk. It was an HDD card that Tandy made for the Tandy 3000/4000 machines and was 52 MB. It cost me a whopping $1800 CAD and I had to buy a memory upgrade for it to work well ($450).
I am still not complaining about hard disk prices, even though I don’t use them anymore. I have switched to SSDs and NVME drives in my computers. Now those prices I am complaining about.
due to the rising costs of SSDs, mechanical hard drives have gotten popular again. i’ve seen a doubling of mechanical hard drive prices. hell, ferrite core memory has probably gotten more expensive too!
Turns out the AI companies are taking up all the time in the core memory factories too
My father had several of those, and when one of them stopped working (I’m not sure why, but he was probably told that it wasn’t able to be fixed by the Tandy Computer Service Center) he brought it home and we took it apart. This was back when these things weren’t ancient, so way before I took apart any other hard drives. What stood out to me was a non-contact sensor for detecting one spot on the spindle, how much stuff there was that wasn’t disk platters, how shiny the platters were, that the heads didn’t look as magical as I thought it hey would, the magnets, and that there was an air filter (which is why the inside looks almost new). I had seen the insides of some other electronics by then, but a few years later I saw the insides of PCs and noticed that they didn’t have filters. Their hard drives had their circuit boards covered for a while, but then half of the PCB would have its components exposed to PC atmosphere.
That was expensive even for 1983. I bought an IBM PC XT with a 10mb disk in early 1984 for $4995.
That brings back memories. Still have one for a model 4.
I sold these for RS out of my computer dept at a mall store. These where monsters