Ex Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer says 'SD cards are lame!' and opts to rescue a 200 lb 14-inch magnetic disc drive from the '80s with just 622 MB of storage
Even if you don't know the name 'Dave Plummer', you're certainly familiar with his work. This former Microsoft engineer is known for coding Pinball on Windows NT, as well as creating Task Manager. Well, today, he's a YouTuber and creator, and he's decided to fit his home with a whopping 200-pound 14-inch disc drive, which launched in Japan in 1982 and came to America in 1983. The forty-year-old tech may not store much, but it does have a loud sound. Wait, that's not a good thing?
In a video titled "SD Cards are LAME!", Plummer shows off his DEC RA82 disc drive. "You can feel it through the floor when it seeks hard" is what Plummer tells the camera, in what I can only assume is a bit of glee.
In order to even get the drive up into their home rack, Plummer ordered a hydraulic scissor lift. "You don't so much install one of these as you do birth it like an ocean liner".
To get the drive operational with his choice of OS (Unix), Plummer did a low-level format to handle future data, partitioned the disk into different regions for storage, and then created file systems on those partitions.
And what does all this weight, size, and effort get you? A whopping 622 MB of storage. That's enough storage to fit Balatro around nine times, or Astarion's right arm, probably. Okay, the point of this drive clearly isn't efficiency. Plummer isn't buying this to beat out the best external SSDs or to boot up a quick game of Arc Raiders. He's buying this tech, as the kids say, for the love of the game.
"What I really wanted was period-correct storage with its own beautiful set of limitations, rituals, and noises". Plummer addresses critiques of inefficiency in his latest video. He brings up that a common response is to say that running vintage hardware is 'neat but practical', and Plummer argues not only is vintage hardware designed to be run together, but it's educational and 'it's beautiful.'
That last one is hard to ignore, when we take into account both the retro off-white look and the hum the entire rack makes when it spins up. In the last minute of "SD Cards are Lame!", Plummer hits the spindle motor, trips the breaker in the machine, and then it finally runs. Classic.
What the device returns is the hum of machinery, the spinning of drives, and the general cacophony of retro bleebs and bloops. If you've ever held an external drive up to your ear while it's running, you will recognise those familiar clicks, taps, and scratches that storage tends to make, and it's at full force with the RA 82. Plummer is right: vintage hardware certainly is quite educational.