This old external hard drive can do WHAT?!

external hard drives have been a popular way to add data storage for decades now but this one tried to take things to a whole new [Music] [Music] level I stumbled across what at first glance looks like a big external hard drive it's from micronet and called the sand cube and a name like that suggests it's capable of more yet on the back instead of network Jacks it has four firewire ports that's not what one would expect so I decided to take it apart not just to give it a good cleaning but also take a peek at what may be going on inside its late '90s appearance means its external Plastics are mounted to an inner metal cube the clear sides have four hex screws each and then easily come off the graphite colored middle piece has its own screws on the front and back then can be lifted away I'll clean these up a bit later this thing is pretty dusty so I got the vacuum out before I went any further sand Cube was clearly not meant to be user serviceable as evidenced by not one but two warranty void stickers on the bottom while these aren't great they do at least give some indication as to whether any goofing around has gone on on inside and in this case there hasn't that ends now as I removed the Phillip screws securing the front and back panels then went to remove the feet micronet was clearly serious about keeping people out as these used security Torx screws with a pin in the middle but I have a set of those screwdriver bits so they weren't a problem next the outer shell came off to give a good look at the drives there are six in here specifically IBM deskstar s with a capacity of 46 GB each they're all IDE and I was curious how they connected so I disassembled the sand Cube further unplugging all the cables revealed the brains of the operation Which is less complex than I had anticipated there are six IDE Channels with each getting its own ATA to firewire controller and a pair of firewire Hub chips to TI all together okay so where are the brains in this thing maybe on the back of the board nope there's even less going on here just passive components and some small flash memory chips that support the controllers so that means this thing isn't exactly a sand or storage area network like one would expect from a hardware perspective it really is just a big external firewire hard drive what's the big deal I pondered over that while I got it all put back together the fan in the bottom did a good job of sucking in a lot of dust which I cleaned out as I went it's unfortunate this thing isn't more serviceable with six hard drives failures especially IBM desk stars or desk stars is a win not an if so Micron Net's paranoia of customers getting inside likely cost it more money than it saved since this sucker is heavy and was probably expensive to ship for warranty repairs I got the outside of the cube wiped down then threw the outer Plastics in the sink to give them a good scrubbing they started looking much better but removing the dust also revealed the unfortunate scratches and scrapes this sand Cube accumulated over the years a sad side effect from this era of industrial design but after they dried it was easy enough to get the panels put back on and ultimately this thing looks far better than when I got it but does it work I plugged it in and flipped the switch and it powered on being a FireWire device it was primarily targeted at Mac users so I pulled out a period accurate computer when I plugged in a FireWire cable I expected a drive to appear on the desktop but nothing maybe it had been wiped so I opened Drive setup but it didn't show up there either did it at least appear in apple system profiler kind of the iBook knew something was connected to the firewire bus but didn't quite know what it was the owner's manual makes reference to a software installer you needed to run that contains the system extensions necessary to get it recognized properly but I spent days scouring the internet for a copy and came up empty-handed it was never offered for download from the sand Cube site the closest thing I could find was an update it said you needed to have the software already installed before it would run but I gave it a shot anyway and they weren't lying it refused to do anything that updater was made using Aladdin's installer maker and I wondered if I could use it to extract the files as a workaround but installer maker didn't even want to see it as a file it could open even if I tried the old school trick of dropping it directly on the application icon as a last Stitch effort I threw it at stuff at expander which is also an aladdin product but it didn't do anything either it's probably just as well I couldn't get the drivers I needed because there are two other pieces of software I wasn't able to find either and there what makes the sand Cube interesting the first one is called Express raid and it's what lets you manage the raid arrays and volumes that the sand Cube presents you could configure pairs of drives as raid zero or one in any any combination you wanted but the real magic behind sand Cube was when you installed Excel Weare which let you share it across multiple Macs this is the reason why the unit has four firewire ports on it one cable for each computer as long as Excel Weare was installed on all of them it handled making the drives multi-axis capable that is to say the computers could read and write data from the same volumes without stepping on each other or causing corruption so this was a sand in all but its name it didn't use ethernet simply because fire wire was much faster at 400 megabits per second at a time when 100 megabit fast ethernet was the most common and gigabit networking was bleeding edge and expensive I can't say I'm surprised that Express raid and Excel Weare are impossible to find they were actually commercial software licensed from another company called Ado which serves the high-end store storage Market Ado is still around and just so I could say I tried I opened a support ticket and asked if they could provide the software but of course I just got a generic apply that they wouldn't help and even if I could find a copy it looks like it was software that required a serial number and product activation the service for which has long since been discontinued sand Cube debuted in January 2000 in several configurations this one is apparently the highest end model with six drives and Licensing for four concurrent users and it likely cost $4,000 us or so it's hard to get an exact number because information on this thing is pretty scarce with most searches turning up results about the Nissan Cube instead there was also an announcement for a companion firewire tape backup Drive called the fire tape 50 but beyond a press release it seems to have been vaporware so with that my exploration of the sand Cube came to a sudden end almost like what happened to its manufacturer micronet got its start in the 1980s selling external scuzzy squ and hard drives it was bought by aex in 1998 after that company pivoted away from magnetic tape and towards digital video and audio production which was a market in which micronet had a foothold but aex didn't really know what to do with it and in February 2001 announced that micronet would go out of business this shocked employees who felt it was still viable and they launched an independent effort to find a buyer perhaps surprisingly they were successful with Phantom drives acquiring micronet in April of that year Phantom drives eventually dropped the micronet brand but take a close look at its site and you'll find micronet still lives on as its parent company sand Cube was an interesting product but the niche Market at Catered to meant it didn't sell very well fire wire was faster than eanet at the time but a limit of only four users and the fact that the cables could only be 4 1/2 M or about 15 ft long meant that everyone connecting to it had to be physically nearby yes you could get repeaters that would convert fire wire to Fiber Optic Cables as a way to extend that distance but if you were willing to go that far you'd likely just step up to a proper sand solution using fiber channel the cards and software for which Ado was happy to sell you sand Cube was a creative solution but the problem it tried to solve just wasn't that big to begin with if you like the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe here's another video you should check out and as always thanks for [Music] watching oh

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 93,199

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Id: 3gqXSvGh6PI

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024