21 Oct
2012
21 Oct
'12
10:42 p.m.
On Sun, 21 Oct 2012, David Riley wrote:
On Oct 21, 2012, at 6:35 PM, allison wrote:
I powered up one of these Quantum Bigfoot drives earlier this year. It
came out of a discarded junk-clone Pentium class machine and appeared to
have been transferred from a previous computer by the original owner. It
seemed to work well, but it was -noisy-, not in terms of wear, but just
normal operating noise. Maybe the noise they made during normal operation
was part of their bad reputation? I'd just as soon use a 1GB CF card in
place of one of these drives today since small CF cards are so easy to
come by. I do remember Compaq made extensive use of some of these Quantum
drives in some of their consumer PCs, so at one time there were quite a
lot of them around.
Then again I have CDC 20mb SCSI that everyone
said was the worst drive
for failure thats still going (CP/M machine using Micromint SB180) and
a Quantum Bigfoot 1gb IDE that is supposed to be also terrible and mine
was gotten free and still runs a backup 486DX box.
My recollection of the Bigfoot was that its terrible reputation was more
due to the speed than the reliability; it was a 5.25" drive in a 3.5"
world, so I wonder if they were able to spend the extra space on beefier
servos. I didn't hear any complaints about their reliability, but
perhaps I wasn't listening in the right circles.