The NEC D-Series of hard drives spanned from the late 80’s with their MFM/RLL-capable lineup of drives such as the D3122, to end with the HDA design of the D3724, being wildly altered compared to the models being demonstrated in this post.

I’ve had quite a lot of experience with NEC drives from this period, but unfortunately this post isn’t going to shed them in the greatest of lights. These five drives all suffer from the same issue; physical shock based damage. I’m not entirely sure how I ended up with these drives, so I can’t really digress into their backgrounds. How this ended up occuring will remain somewhat of a mystery. It’s quite the shame, regardless. Nonetheless, it provides a good opportunity to look inside and see NEC’s handywork in action!

Interestingly, all of these drives demonstrate identical failure modes. There’s no drive activity whatsoever, once spun up. It’s not too surprising, based on the state some of these drives are in.

If you’re interesting in seeing & hearing how one of these sounds when they work as intended, feel free to check out my post covering the D3711’s here.

As each of these drives have slightly different internal designs, this post will be seperated per-model.

NEC D3713

  Drive Attributes
  -------------------------------------
  NEC D3713
  -------------------------------------
  Capacity      345MB
  Mfc Date      1995-05
  Format        3.5"
  Interface     PATA
  Platters      2
  Heads         4
  RPM           4090
  CHS           2254/4/63 (native)
                670/16/63 (translated)
  -------------------------------------

There aren’t a lot of differences between these and the D3711, aside from having an extra platter, thus double the capacity. This drive was manufactured in the Philippines, being produced by NEC’s subcontracter Tsukiden Electronics Industries, Inc. (TEII). This D3713 was built rather late in this line of drives production, the DSE line would succeed these just a year later.

NEC D3746

  Drive Attributes
  -------------------------------------
  NEC D3746
  -------------------------------------
  Capacity      120MB
  Mfc Date      1994-04
  Format        3.5"
  Interface     PATA
  Platters      1
  Heads         2
  RPM           4090
  -------------------------------------

These are a little more obscure, seeing as there’s nothing about this model on the web. Nonetheless, we can figure out everything we need to know from looking inside.

**Similar to the D3711. A different magnet/bumper assembly.**

**Pure carnage. This head went flying.**

**Once again, the actuator mechanism, internally.**

**The PCB (the original capacitors were blown, these were replaced with ones I had in stock, initially temporarily).**

NEC D3766

  Drive Attributes
  -------------------------------------
  NEC D3766
  -------------------------------------
  Capacity      245MB
  Mfc Date      1994-02
  Format        3.5"
  Interface     PATA
  Platters      2
  Heads         3
  RPM           4090
  -------------------------------------

This one refuses to unlock the actuator, but there’s at least two non-functional heads regardless. The top-most surface isn’t used on this model.