Hard Drive Sounds: IBM WDS-L42C2
6Manufacturer: IBM
Model: WDS-L42C2
Date of manufacture: Unknown (1992 copyright date)
Device name: IBM WDS-L42
Capacity: 40 MB
Rotational speed: 3600 RPM
Interface: 50-pin parallel SCSI
Form factor: Slimline, 3.5-inch
Actuator: Voice Coil
Fully-functional? Yup!
Origin: Macintosh LC
Current home: Macintosh SE FDHD
The WDS-L42C2 seems to be as typical an example as any IBM 3.5" drive from the early 90s. It's a fairly loud drive, with a (personally) less-than-enjoyable spindle whine and the distinctive "soft" IBM seek tick. Seriously, man, that spindle whine is way too high pitched for my taste.
It's built absolutely rock-solid. You can see the PCB mounted completely separately from the drive body, with the drive sort of floating above it, with the flywheel exposed. It has a beautiful black finish on the body, making for my personal favorite drive aesthetic ever.
IBM drives of this era were known as some of the most reliable drives Apple ever put in their computers. Come to think of it, in all IBM drives ever, the only drives I've seen fail were early 2000s Deskstars. They just made good, very reliable equipment sold with pretty respectable business practices.
Configuration used:
Dell Dimension 5150 from around 2005 probably. Specs aren't important but it's a Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz with 1 gig of RAM.
Adaptec AHA-2930CU PCI SCSI interface
FreeDOS 1.2 from a floppy disk running the HDMotion software.