hard drive history

Photo: Red Hill.

Seagate Medalist 1082

After struggling Conner Peripherals was swallowed up Seagate, many of the Conner drives were rebadged as Seagates and continued in production for a time. The Medalist 1082, however, came along after the merger and was never sold under the Conner brand. Whether the drive internals were designed by Conner or by Seagate, only an insider would know. The distinctive brushed aluminium casing, however, was pure Conner, more or less unchanged from the humble 270MB CFS270A.

It was quite common for drives to use tape instead of a pressure gasket to achieve an airtight seal, but fairly rare to omit the usual six vertical screws around the perimeter and very rare indeed not to have screws joining the lid to the centres of the disc and actuator spindles. But apparently the designers saw no benefit in this easily-achieved extra rigidity — and they must have been right, because the Medalist 1082 and its various successors were all good, dependable units.

Like the later Medalist 1276, the 1082 was firmly in the Conner tradition: a moderate performer even by the standard of the day, but cheap, fuss-free and dependable. We put a lot of these into entry-level budget systems and network terminals, where they gave long and faithful service. It was a best-selling drive for us for quite a while and remained common as a trade-in up until about 1999.

→ Illustration: a very common combination in the mid-nineties, Medalist 1082 with Chaintech 486SPM main board and Cyrix 5x86-100 CPU.